Invincea Gives Researchers Free Malware Detection and Analytics Tools

The 11 Essentials of Enterprise Security

People involved in security research are working on behalf of the common good so they shouldn’t have to pay for the tools required to discover new threats.

That’s the thinking behind a new free edition of malware discovery and analysis software for security researchers from Invincea.

In partnership with ThreatGRID, a provider of unified malware analysis and threat intelligence tools, Invincea is making an edition of its malware detection and analytics software available for free as part of an effort to simply even the IT security odds. With thousands of variants of various types of malware being created weekly, Invincea CEO Anup Ghosh says Invincea analytics tools make it easier to identify which cluster of malware a particular threat is a derived from. Once identified, it becomes a lot easier to determine what methods should be employed to neutralize that particular threat.

Invincea Research Edition is based on Invincea FreeSpace, a secure virtual container for web browsers and plug-ins. Once the exploit is detected, forensic information related to the malware is sent to an Invincea Management Service (IMS) cloud service, through which threat intelligence information is shared with the larger security research community. That crowdsourcing approach to security research, says Ghosh, makes it simpler to not only identify the nature of a particular threat, but also leverage the collective wisdom of the security community to defend against its many derivatives.

The simple truth is that purveyors of malware are not using advanced IT science to launch their attacks. Most of what they are doing is trying to exploit known vulnerabilities in some new way that is harder to detect. IT security depends on the ability of security researchers to identify those new variants of malware as quickly as they are generated. The better the tools they have access to, the faster that process becomes.

That means rather than charging security researchers for the tools they need to perform that task on behalf of us all, the time has come to not only remove the financial burdens associated with doing their jobs, but also thank them for their service.