Continuous Analysis Yields Continuous Leadership Against Advanced Threats

Organizations today have no shortage of challenges when it comes to cyber security and their growing IT infrastructure. Not only is the frequency and sophistication of malware attacks on the rise, but with the proliferation of mobility, BYOD, IoT, and cloud services; the number of entry points an attacker has into the network grows exponentially with them.

Given this landscape we know the most effective way to address these threats is with security offering continuous analysis and retrospective protection that extends across all attack vectors in the extended network. With AMP Everywhere, security is just as pervasive as today’s advanced threats, and thanks to continuous analysis and retrospective protection, our customers gain reduced time to detection.

For the second year in a row, we have third-party validation from NSS Labs that we provide the most effective security available in the market today. Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) was tested along with seven other vendors and achieved a 99.2% security effectiveness score – the highest of all vendors tested in the 2015 NSS Labs Security Value Map (SVM) for Breach Detection Systems. What I find most interesting and rather disappointing in these results is that Cisco is the only vendor in the test to successfully handle all evasion attempts.

The importance of Time to Detection

We believe our AMP Everywhere approach driven by continuous analysis and retrospective security is a key element in our success and a good look into the value of this approach can be had when examining Time to Detection (TTD) – the window of time between the first observation of a file and the detection of a threat. In our recent Midyear Security Report, we track TTD for AMP — less than two days, between 41 to 50 hours. This is in stark contrast with the current industry standard for time to detection, estimated to be between 100 and 200 days.

It would be easy to stop here and forget to mention that Cisco’s leadership in security effectiveness goes well beyond AMP and this most recent BDS test. Our leadership spans our security portfolio and enjoys leading security effectiveness scores in NSS NGIPS (99.5%), NGFW (99.2%), and Data Center NGIPS (99.4%) tests. Together these products work in concert to constrain the operational space an attacker has and this results in greater prevention and detection for all of our customers.

We encourage you to examine the results. Please download a free copy of the 2015 NSS Labs Breach Detection Systems SVM and PAR for Advanced Malware Protection.