Virsec, the industry leader in application-aware workload protection, announced that regional companies emerging out of the pandemic are accelerating their investments into digital transformation. They are increasingly concerned about the everyday announcements of cybersecurity compromises at large and medium enterprises, global and regional.

As organizations face growing sophistication of cyberattacks, the demand for effective solutions is skyrocketing. Advanced attack techniques, that execute at runtime in the memory layer, have become mainstream and companies are struggling to combat them.

Virsec Security Platform delivers a powerful solution for container workload protection with runtime visibility and zero-dwell-time defense throughout running container images, including binaries, libraries, interpreted code, and memory.

“It is imperative we change the way we think about the protection of our assets and infrastructure. Conventional security tools, like blacklisting models, were designed to address yesterday’s challenges, and we can’t continue to accept these offerings as the ideal option to mitigate advanced threat scenarios,” said Bobby Gupta, Senior Vice President and Managing Director International, Virsec.

With more than 50 patents, Virsec provides the first and only application-aware workload protection platform that incorporates System Integrity Assurance, Application Control and Memory Protection into a single solution. Virsec delivers in-depth visibility across the entire workload and detects and blocks known and unknown threats that remain concealed by heuristic and endpoint security solutions.

“Security has entered a third wave, driven by the skyrocketing success of more damaging and sophisticated attacks across cloud workloads and virtual server infrastructure,” says Jim Routh, Chief Security Advisor and Board Participant at Virsec. “It is time for security to be re-evaluated at its deepest levels and approached holistically by integrating security into IT and application infrastructure in runtime across a broad range of IT environments and application languages. Virsec has pioneered this approach with its breakthrough platform.”

The Virsec solution maps the expected performance of each application on a workload and protects the memory those applications use to execute. Virsec ensures that the components of those applications are correct and unmodified before they are allowed to execute, and any deviation from the norm is treated as a threat.

Virsec also reported significant momentum in the first half of 2021 with strong revenue growth, strategic customer validation and testing, and industry acceptance of its non-traditional approach to reducing cyber threats.

Virsec’s growth correlates with increasing board-level concerns about the financial, safety, and intellectual property impacts of evolving threat scenarios and the subsequent need to have deeper visibility into application workloads at runtime.

By: PG Menon, Director of Marketing at Infoblox

Cloud-native technologies transform businesses at a global scale

Companies like Amazon and Netflix leveraged cloud technologies to go from being mail order companies to some of the world’s largest consumer on-demand businesses. Cloud-native technologies empowered them to make this transition by providing increased agility and productivity, improved scalability and reliability, and lower costs.

In a borderless enterprise identity is the new perimeter

DNS, DHCP and IP address management collectively automates network connectivity and provides visibility into network connected devices. They enable a foundational layer of visibility and security for your network. Network identity has long been used as a means for authentication and authorization because it ensures you are who you say you are, and, only allows you to do what you are permitted to do no matter where you are located and or your access method.

Identity now includes human users, devices and applications

In transitioning to cloud, the different types of cloud-native applications developed and deployed by organizations such as microservices, web applications or bots are inherently different than human identities and require additional oversight. For example, in operation, Kubernetes requires access to registries on the internet to download various containerized micro-services. There may be hundreds or even thousands of identities accessing resources across an enterprise network on a regular basis, each with its own unique set of circumstances.

Volume and variety of corporate identities are plaguing enterprise IT

Per IDC, it is not uncommon for applications to use their own LDAP directories. Managing those directories and controlling risk is a problem. Enterprise IT simply doesn’t have the level of visibility required to truly understand which identities are performing what actions on their critical resources across multiple and vastly different cloud operating models. Moreover, the identity teams don’t have the time or expertise to keep up with the proliferation of privileges, roles, resources and services across multiple cloud platforms.

ML and AI has transformed identity management

Identity lies in the core of security. Traditional identity mechanisms don’t apply to modern and often hybrid workloads. Runtime authorization decisions are now made within, applications. One integrated platform instead of several discrete Identity and Access Management solutions consumed in a SaaS-delivered manner is the answer. In addition, an ML/AI-driven approach that automates the identity management processes can improve operational efficiencies. AI and ML technologies continuously monitor access relationships and patterns for every cloud resource and aligns with zero trust network access (ZTNA) model for the enterprise.

Peer-to-peer fintech partnering with global businesses to offer bitcoin as payment option

Paxful, the leading global peer-to-peer fintech, today announced Paxful Pay, an e-commerce solution that allows businesses worldwide to receive bitcoin. The service is available today and allows customers to pay with almost 400 payment methods – exchanging into bitcoin that is sent to the merchant’s digital wallet. Businesses can register now to add Paxful Pay as a purchase option to their online checkout process.

Through Paxful Pay, businesses have the ability to manage their earnings and convert bitcoin into their local currency on the Paxful Marketplace using almost 400 payment methods. Merchants will also have control over the configuration of the solution on their Paxful Merchant Dashboard and can track every transaction. The company expects to expand to other digital currencies and also plans to introduce automatic conversion into stablecoins such as Tether (USDT). Further down the line, Paxful Pay will allow merchants to automatically convert bitcoin into their local currency within their bank account.

Consumers can expect the typical e-commerce flow — but will now have the option of selecting Paxful Pay as a payment method. This will prompt users to create a new profile or login as an existing Paxful user. Users can then use almost 400 payment methods to complete their purchase. With their Paxful login, users can also take advantage of Paxful’s other products such as Paxful Marketplace and Paxful Wallet.

Ray Youssef, CEO and co-founder of Paxful, said: “In many regions across the globe, we see people use bitcoin as a financial tool for purchasing goods and services. Bitcoin has several different use cases that we’ve only begun to leverage and e-commerce is a great example. At Paxful, it’s imperative that we give users and businesses around the world the opportunity to take advantage of the power of bitcoin to gain financial freedom.”

Artur Schaback, COO and co-founder of Paxful, said: “We’re thrilled to bring Paxful Pay to our global community. There is a clear need to offer local options for bitcoin and this product is a culmination of our efforts to deliver on that demand. By offering users the ability to complete purchases using almost 400 payment methods, they will now have an even stronger financial solution at their fingertips. We cannot wait to expand this offering to encompass as many merchants as possible.”

Currently, Paxful has over a hundred merchants on Paxful Pay. As the company ramps up the service, it expects to onboard a select number of new merchants in the coming weeks. From there, Paxful Pay will expand more generally.

Founded in 2015 and completely bootstrapped since then, Paxful is headquartered in New York with offices in Estonia, the Philippines and Russia. The team has doubled in size over the last 12 months, growing to over 400 people.

SonicWall today announced three new high-performance firewall models for enterprises and large organizations — NSa 4700, NSa 6700 and NSsp 13700 — designed to accelerate network throughput, stop advanced cyberattacks like ransomware, and securely connect millions of users. Featuring some of the highest port densities in their class, the new appliances help enterprises keep pace with the speeds of their growing networks — all while drastically reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

“The growing volume of ransomware attacks has enterprises and government agencies moving quickly to evaluate their mitigation capabilities and strengthen their security postures,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “The recent string of highly publicized cyberattacks has catapulted security to the top of the priority list. We’re there to help by delivering multiple options to cost-effectively protect even the largest environments. With higher port densities and more capacity, the new offerings dramatically disrupt the traditional cost structure as organizations need fewer appliances to secure the same environment.”

New NSa Firewalls Disrupt Cost Expectations by Tripling Throughput, Expanding Port Densities

The new SonicWall NSa 4700 and NSa 6700 next-generation firewalls deliver 18 and 36 Gbps of firewall throughput — three times the previous comparable SonicWall appliances. Both also support critical TLS 1.3 encryption standards.

The NSa models boast some of the highest port densities in their class; the NSa 6700 even offers both 40G and 25G connectivity, delivering multi-gigabit threat protection for large environments. These higher port densities, coupled with hardware redundancy and high availability, allow distributed enterprises to purchase fewer appliances while supporting more secure connections as their networks grow.

The NSa 4700 and NSa 6700 provide up to 115,000 and 153,000 connections, respectively, per second. They also support up to 2 million or 6 million concurrent DPI connections, and up to 4,000 or 6,000 site-to-site VPN tunnels.

High-Performance NSsp 13700 Firewalls Designed To Protect The Fastest, Most Complex Environments
The new SonicWall NSsp 13700 is an advanced next-generation firewall for high-speed threat protection designed for enterprise-class networks and MSSPs that supports millions of encrypted connections.

The NSsp 13700 next-generation firewall delivers elite speeds for threat prevention throughput (45.5 Gbps), IPS (48 Gbps) and IPsec (29 Gbps), and include scalable hardware architecture with high port density. Like SonicWall’s other new offerings, the NSsp 13700 supports the latest TLS 1.3 encryption standard.

New Capture Labs Portal Delivers Research Tools, Centralized Repository
Information-sharing and collaboration is a critical component of an organization’s defensive posture. SonicWall is consolidating access to threat research and security news through the Capture Labs Portal, a free and centralized repository of research tools available to the public where visitors can track malicious actors and remain up to date with latest zero-day vulnerabilities.

To help expedite remediation, the Capture Labs Portal offers a single repository to look up threat signature, CVE details, IP reputation, and URL reputation, making it effortless to do your threat research from a single interface. SonicWall PSIRT advisories and Capture Labs threat researcher blogs with news regarding the latest vulnerabilities can be easily and quickly found      out to take actions in response to emerging threats, attack vectors or vulnerabilities.

Simplify Secure SD-WAN Deployment, Management with New Orchestration and Monitoring Capabilities
Enterprises, service providers, government agencies and MSSPs can efficiently manage large-scale deployments with SonicWall’s cloud-native Network Security Manager (NSM), which delivers a single, easy-to-use cloud interface for streamlined management, analytics and reporting.

With NSM 2.3, network infrastructure teams can quickly troubleshoot and resolve issues as they monitor secure SD-WAN landscapes in real time. Administrators can monitor the health and performance of complete SD-WAN environments to ensure consistent configurations and drive optimal application performance.

SD-WAN environments are now easily organized using SonicWall’s new and intuitive self-guided workflow as well as the use of Templates that allow the provisioning of thousands of remote firewalls efficiently.

Enterprises also can leverage the NSM wizard-based setup process to ensure proper configuration for site-to-site VPN connectivity, and use the monitoring tools to track the connections and ensure optimum performance.

Optimize Productivity with Enhanced Network Visibility, Monitoring and Reporting
Managing employees’ internet utilization and behavior can be a substantial challenge for organizations. SonicWall has enhanced network visibility and reporting capabilities across security devices, users, VPN connections and more.

SonicWall Analytics 3.1 delivers Productivity Reports to provide insights into employees’ internet utilization and behavior. Generated snapshots and drill-down reports can classify users’ web activities into productivity groups such as productive, unproductive, acceptable, unacceptable or custom-defined groups.

Drill-down capabilities enable analysts to easily and quickly pivot and investigate data points of interest at the user level, and establish evidence-backed, policy-controlled measures for risky users and applications as they unfold in the discovery process.

New VPN Reports allow organizations to summarize what company resources are being accessed inside VPN tunnels, how much bandwidth they are consuming and by whom. Network admins can leverage this information for monitoring business-critical applications, controlling or shaping traffic, and planning for capacity growth.

Zero-Trust Security Offering Expanded to Include More Granular Control

SonicWall also introduced Device Posture Check with SonicWall Cloud Edge Secure Access 1.1, and the addition of new Network Traffic Control that enforces access control to the resources based on user groups, IP addresses, ports and network protocols.