Symantec Introduces New Security Solutions to Counter Advanced Persistent Threats

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and Symantec Protection Center 2.0 to combat the volume and complexity of cyber attacks in traditional and virtual environments

Symantec Introduces New Security Solutions to Counter Advanced Persistent Threats
Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and Symantec Protection Center 2.0 to combat the volume and complexity of cyber attacks in traditional and virtual environments


LAS VEGAS - Symantec Vision–– Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) continues its mission to protect the world’s information and allow organizations to confidently conduct business in today’s connected world. Threats to information continually evolve, and new security solutions from Symantec help organizations of all sizes identify and combat coordinated, multi-pronged attacks on information which are striking businesses with increasing frequency. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12, now available for public beta and optimized for virtual environments, will offer organizations the vital protection needed to effectively block both known and new cyber threats. Symantec Protection Center 2.0 will draw upon correlated visibility from multiple security products combined with Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network to provide relevant actionable intelligence that reduces risks to enterprise businesses.





Threat Landscape: The sheer volume of sophisticated attacks targeting organizations of all sizes poses a daunting challenge for traditional signature-based security solutions that can’t keep up. According to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, in 2010, attackers unleashed more than 286 million distinct malicious programs, an average of more than nine new threats every second of every day. These threats impact multiple areas of the IT infrastructure with a 93 percent increase in Web-based attacks, 42 percent more mobile vulnerabilities, and 6,253 new vulnerabilities including 14 zero-day vulnerabilities which played a key role in targeted attacks like Hydraq and Stuxnet. Security solutions that provide central management and security intelligence are required to combat persistent, coordinated assaults on organizations today.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12: To provide unmatched protection against this new threat landscape, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 is designed to detect and block sophisticated new threats earlier, more accurately, and with greater performance than any other security product. Symantec Endpoint Protection leverages Insight, Symantec’s award-winning community and cloud-based reputation technology, to block new and unknown threats missed by other security solutions. By blocking risky files with a poor reputation from entering an organization, Symantec Endpoint Protection provides a vital first line of defense in the battle against advanced persistent threats. Built for speed and effectiveness in virtual environments, internally-conducted testing of the software in heavily consolidated virtual environments shows a 90 percent reduction in disk usage, thus delivering up to a tenfold increase in consolidation density. Symantec continues to work closely with VMware to take full advantage of virtualization awareness and introspection capabilities based on VMware vShield™ technology, and Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 is the first step along the optimization path for virtual and cloud environments.

Symantec now opens its previously invitation-only beta program to the public, and interested parties may sign up here. Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 12, also now available for public beta, will offer small organizations with limited IT staff and resources a solution they can easily deploy to start protecting their businesses in less than 20 minutes (on average in a less than 50 user environment). The new versions are scheduled to be generally available later this year for purchase through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators or directly.

Large and small organizations differ vastly in the complexity of environments and the expertise required to deploy and manage protection which is why Symantec provides different offerings based on those organizational needs. For mid- to large-sized organizations, Symantec offers Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 for on-premises deployment. For smaller organizations, Symantec offers both on-premises and cloud-based solutions with Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition and Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud, respectively, providing customers with flexibility of choice and freedom of deployment to best meet their business needs.

Symantec Protection Center 2.0: Effective protection against today’s complex attacks requires correlated visibility into multiple security products along with actionable intelligence to reduce risk and simplify management. Without a way to summarize and prioritize risk factors across products, groups and regions, organizations can easily overlook high-severity threats and compromise their security posture. Symantec Protection Center 2.0 is a centralized security management console that will allow organizations to identify emerging threats, prioritize tasks and accelerate time to protection based on relevant, actionable intelligence.

To identify emerging threats across local and global environments, Symantec Protection Center will offer a centralized view across the Symantec security portfolio and third-party products through three levels of integration - single sign-on, data collection and process automation. Organizations will be able to extract local intelligence from their security solutions to identify trends across areas such as malware, spam and assets. Symantec Protection Center delivers context-aware security management by correlating data from enterprise security products along with early warning alerts from the Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network, one of the world’s leading commercial cyber-intelligence communities. Symantec Protection Center 2.0 is fully integrated with Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and will be available for existing Symantec customers of integrated products at no additional charge later this year.

Symantec Security Framework: Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Protection Center are part of the Symantec Security Framework, a portfolio of security products and services that enable organizations to counter emerging threats, support new computing models and simplify security management. Symantec’s portfolio of security products and services allow organizations to pursue innovations - such as mobile, cloud and virtual computing models. By providing relevant, actionable security intelligence and simultaneously simplifying security management, businesses can increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of their security posture.

Quotes:

“With the right protection, virtual environments can be as secure, or even more secure, than traditional infrastructure as a result of increased standardization, visibility, automation and control available in high-density environments. Symantec Endpoint Protection defends against all types of attacks and is optimized for performance on VMware View™ and VMware vSphere®.”
-- Francis deSouza, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Security Group, Symantec
“Organizations leveraging the VMware vSphere® platform require superior security effectiveness that doesn’t sacrifice performance. We’re working closely with Symantec, including continued collaboration on VMware vShield™, to remove security barriers for customers and help them expand their virtualization projects to enable enterprise hybrid clouds.”
--Parag Patel, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware
“I’m interested in virtualizing more of my environments, but security must continue to function effectively without causing unacceptable slowdowns. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 in a virtual environment is demonstrating a high level of performance without sacrificing the security of my virtual machines.”
-- Seth Shestack, Associate Director of Information Security, Temple University
“The best thing about Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition is that we don’t even know it is there – the product didn’t slow anything down, the installation was flawless and we know we’re protected. It is not common practice for us to participate in beta programs, but our confidence in Symantec is so high that in this case, participating in the beta felt risk-free. We have had a great experience with this product throughout the years, and we are impressed with how Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Small Business Edition continues to completely protect our business information.”
-- Paul Shager, Sales Manager, Sea-Way Marine
“Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition protects our case workers while they are out in the field. Their laptops contain sensitive information, and the new protection features offered in the beta have enabled The Arc to save both time and money that would have been spent remediating infected computers. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Small Business Edition has helped us simplify the management of our systems.”
--Linda Yurko, Associate Executive Director, The Arc of Greensboro
“Bringing security intelligence, internal threat reporting and real-time global threat information together in a single web interface that supports role specific views is critical to reducing operational security overhead and improves an organization’s ability to take immediate action against advanced persistent threats.”
-- Lawrence Pingree, Research Director - Datacenter Transformation & Cloud Security, Gartner

About Business Solutions from Symantec

Symantec helps organizations secure and manage their information-driven world with endpoint security, messaging security, web security, data protection, identity authentication and security management solutions.

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com.