The brave new world of enterprise security

An excerpt from The Digital Enterprise says

“There is a growing acceptance that most commercially available antivirus software cannot keep up with the speed and intensity of the attacker community. Also, if attackers are going to target an enterprise directly, they are likely to use a new technique that most antivirus products will miss. Consequently, at least some CIOs are reducing their firewall
and antivirus software spend and are shifting their resources to other security tactics.”

FireEye just announced they are acquiring Mandiant. In a world of giants like Symantec and McAfee, who are they you may ask?

Rather than using a blacklist to block known threats—the conventional method employed by antivirus software—FireEye software works by assuming everything is suspect and testing programs in a safe “sandbox” before allowing them to run on a machine.

Mandiant gained notoriety by disclosing it had spent 7 years of sleuth work in looking at suspected Chinese cyber-crime. With suspicions about NSA and other government agencies (remember Stuxbet?) growing, using a firm like Mandiant may make more sense that calling in the regulators when there is a breach.

So now you know. And you already knew only the paranoid survive.