NSS Labs Expands Research Offerings with new Breach Prevention System (BPS) Test

AUSTIN, TX--(Marketwired - Dec 14, 2016) - NSS Labs, Inc., the world's leading cyber security product research, testing, and advisory company, today released a new technology overview and a "Call-to-Test" for Breach Prevention Systems. Breach Detection Systems (BDS) have been deployed to provide enhanced detection of advanced malware, zero-day attacks, and targeted attacks to combat more skilled threat actors who are capable of evading traditional security technologies. Now breach detection technology is giving rise to Breach Prevention Systems (BPS) to defend against these more advanced attacks. This new market of BPS offerings has Enterprise IT organizations seeking information to help select the solution that reduces their risk exposure.

The ultimate goal of a BPS offering is to prevent a breach -- loss of data, sabotage, or an exfiltration event -- from occurring. Through advanced technologies including wirespeed forensics, sandboxing, emulation, malware analysis, machine learning, and iterative heuristics, these systems provide a new level of security. Breach prevention offerings can be deployed either at the perimeter of a network or within a segment to analyze traffic in real-time and determine whether sufficient malicious indicators exist as evidence to achieve a conviction and protect against any data loss.

A major challenge in the adoption of these systems is the lack of information in key areas such as security effectiveness, false positive rates, performance capacity, and the impact to user experience. The scope of the test will include:

• Security effectiveness
• Resistance to evasion
• Stability
• Performance
• Total cost of ownership (TCO)

"The level of sophistication that threat actors are employing to penetrate traditional security systems has created the need for advanced breach prevention technology," said Mike Spanbauer, NSS Labs VP of Security, Test & Advisory. "Enterprise customers realize that there is a trade-off to the overall performance as you increase the level of security. Understanding this impact and the overall TCO so decisions around capacity planning can be made is our goal in this test."

"Call-to-Test" for all BPS offerings

As with all NSS Labs comparative tests, there is no fee for participation ensuring an objective, unbiased and independent test. Leading vendors with offerings for BPS are encouraged to submit their products for inclusion in the test. Vendors with major market share, as well as challengers with new technology, will be included.

To learn more, please visit:

• NSS Labs Technology Overview and Test Metrics: Breach Prevention Systems here.
• NSS Labs Blog: Security Goal #1: Preventing the Breach; introducing the Breach Prevention System.

If you wish to participate in the Breach Prevention System test, please contact vendors@nsslabs.com.

About NSS Labs, Inc.

NSS Labs, Inc. is the global leader in security product testing and advisory services, providing businesses with the objective information, analysis, and tools they need to successfully manage cyber security risk. NSS offers advanced solutions including the Cyber Advanced Warning System^™ (CAWS) -- a cloud service that continuously captures live attacks being used by threat actors, and tests security products against those attacks in real time. CEOs, CIOs, CISOs, and information security professionals from many of the world's largest and most demanding enterprises rely on insight from NSS. For more information, visit www.nsslabs.com.