Bit9 Announces Cloud-Based Software Reputation Platform

PRESS RELEASE

February 15, 2011, Waltham, Mass. – Bit9, Inc., the leader in Advanced Endpoint Protection, today announces the first open, cloud-based reputation platform available to assess the trustworthiness of software. The Bit9 Global Software Registry (GSR) is now accessible via an open application programming interface (API) allowing the global cyber security community to easily integrate their solutions with the Bit9 GSR Platform. The Bit9 Global Software Registry is the world’s largest and most complete authority on software, providing reputation ratings to help users identify, categorize, authenticate and trust software. The GSR, with its metadata for over 8 billion file records, delivers the threat and trust information needed to filter and stop the next generation of advanced threats. The Bit9 GSR has become the foundation for a new stack of security technologies that are being deployed to defend against the Advanced Persistent Threat. New security sensors, Advanced Network Protection and Advanced Endpoint Protection, are being leveraged to identify infrastructure anomalies and generate contemporary security events that are then fed to a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. The SIEM combined with Bit9’s reputation service helps organizations correlate elusive threats on the network with stealth malware on the endpoint – correlating symptoms with root cause. “Open access allows organizations to tap into Bit9’s cloud-based GSR and its vast information on software,” said Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer at Bit9. “By opening up our API, we believe we can help increase the rate of innovation across the cyber security community. We are currently collaborating with forensics vendors, security organizations, law enforcement, and software asset management vendors to continually evolve our GSR. Every organization that wants to fight the APT needs a software reputation service – it is the foundation for the new cyber defense blueprint.” How Software Reputation Helps Protect Organizations Today Many innovative organizations are currently utilizing the metadata provided by the Bit9 GSR including enterprise incident response teams, government agencies, antivirus threat research teams, security vendors, software asset management companies and forensic solutions providers.

Forensic and Incident Response

Forensic companies, such as Mandiant are eager to integrate with the platform to shorten their investigation and incident response times by eliminating the known good software from their inquiries.

“Opening the Bit9 Global Software Registry to forensics teams will reduce incident response times as well as shorten investigations,” said Dave Merkel, vice president at Mandiant. “Making this data more easily accessible will benefit the security community as a whole.”

Threat Research

Threat research teams such as those at AVG employ the Bit9 GSR for proactive threat research.

“Open access to the Bit9 Global Software Registry helps us with our proactive threat research, allowing us to sift through large volumes of questionable software and concentrate on the malware, not the known good software,” said Karel Obluk, chief scientist at AVG.

Availability

The web services API to the Bit9 Reputation Service is available immediately. For more information, please visit http://www.bit9.com/ or call +1 617.393.7400.

About Bit9 Bit9 is the leader in Advanced Endpoint Protection. The company's award-winning products provide total visibility and control over all software on endpoints, eliminating the risk caused by malicious, illegal and unauthorized software. Bit9 specializes in protecting organizations against Advanced Persistent Threats.

Bit9 leverages the Bit9 Global Software Registry™ -- the world's largest database of software intelligence -- to identify and classify software, delivering the highest levels of endpoint security, compliance, and manageability. The company's global customers come from a wide variety of industries, such as government, financial services, retail, healthcare, e-commerce and education.

Bit9 was awarded a prestigious $2M United States federal research grant in 2003 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology-Advanced Technology Program (NIST ATP) to conduct the research that is now at the core of our application whitelisting solutions. Bit9 is privately held and based in Waltham, Massachusetts.