Websense Updates Malware, Data Theft Defenses

The 10 new defenses include enhanced ability to detect encrypted uploads and advanced malware payloads. Other new features include optical character recognition (OCR) of text within images, drip data loss prevention (DLP) detection and geolocation awareness.

Websense also offers cloud sandboxing capability that identifies suspicious links in emails for real-time analysis. Once the user clicks on the URL, the system can analyze the website content and browser code in real time, in a cloud environment, to ensure safety in the cloud environment.

[Related: 7 Security Threats Circling Your Network ]

“Most customers do not have enough expertise for protection against advanced malware and data loss,” explained Tom Clare, senior director of product marketing at Websense. “It's getting pretty sophisticated. Customers are primarily thinking about other inflection points, like cloud and BYOD. So, the partners can step up and demonstrate knowledge of how to leverage advanced security capabilities that will keep their businesses safe and more successful. Add professional services like quarterly reviews and policy development, and you have an even stronger value proposition.”

For enhanced manageability the company’s Triton Advanced Malware Threat dashboard records security incidents and also provides in-depth forensics that can be exported, at user discretion, to various SIEM solutions. The net result is the ability to know who was attacked, how the attacks were executed, the types of data that were targeted and where those communications were sent.

“Websense has always had a very strong play across a broad spectrum of technologies,” said Mike Sanders, solutions engineer at Accuvant, a Denver, Colo.-based security partner. “They've added a lot of really cool technologies, especially when you're talking about forensics, the ability to analyze events in the cloud and being able to look at individual documents. They’ve pretty much tried to address every single attack vector. This is a very big deal to our customers.”

Sanders added that the timing of the rollout is particularly good because recent events in the news have increased the level of discussion around information security.

“This is definitely going to open up a lot more conversations,” he said. “It's remarkable how many attacks and exploits [have been] seen in the last year, and I think these attacks are only going to increase. Being able to mitigate those threats, find out where they came from and effectively deal with those threats will go a long way.”

The Websense Triton solution can be deployed on enterprise-grade appliances, as cloud-based services or as hybrids of on-premise and cloud elements.

PUBLISHED JULY 10, 2012