Lumension boosts protection with Intelligence Whitelisting

INFOSECURITY EUROPE: Endpoint security firm Lumension has officially launched its Intelligent Whitelisting application control product, designed to offer improved protection by combining traditional anti-virus and patch management with apps whitelisting technologies.

Lumension Intelligent Whitelisting is part of the firm's Endpoint Management Security Suite, and incorporates Lumension Anti-Virus and Lumension Patch Management within the same application control workflow.

This means that anti-virus technology can be used to identify and clean known malware across the endpoint prior to being whitelisted, while new application files are automatically authorised every time patches are deployed, explained Alan Bentley, senior vice president of international at Lumension.

He added that, with malware threats increasing all the time, traditional signature detection technology alone cannot keep up.

"The costs associated with the failure of traditional methods and the burden on IT administrators to deal with those things has grown," he said.

"Malware signatures have gone through the roof in the past 24 months. Whether you have signature-based or behavioural technology, they're all looking for what is bad, but if you only look at what is bad you'll be unable to cope with the ever increasing amount of bad stuff."

IT administrators have also been given greater flexibility with the product thanks to a trust engine. In this way, they can extend automated whitelist policy management to other trusted sources and deny unwanted apps.

Administrators can also deploy an application whitelist policy in an audit-only mode and log all execution attempts within the whitelisted environment, the firm said.

Lumension's cloud-based check-up tool, the Endpoint Integrity Service, is also included so that IT teams can check the safety and security of any apps running on their endpoint, said Bentley.