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Trend Micro Incorporated is introducing “Custom Defense” – the industry’s first advanced threat protection solution that enables businesses and government agencies not only to detect and analyze advanced persistent threats (APTs) and targeted attacks, but also to rapidly adapt their protection and respond to these attacks. Custom Defense integrates software, global threat intelligence, and specialized tools and services to deliver a customized and comprehensive solution for businesses and government.

Today’s most damaging attacks are those targeted specifically at an organization – its people, systems, and data. Stealthier and more sophisticated then ever, cybercriminals use clever social engineering techniques like spear phishing to quietly penetrate select organizations, deploying customized malware that can live undetected for months within an organization. Cybercriminals can remotely and covertly steal an organization’s valuable information – from credit card data to the more lucrative intellectual property or government secrets – potentially destroying an organization’s competitive advantage, or in the case of government even putting national security at risk.

“Our research indicates that the majority of enterprise security professionals believe that it is ‘highly likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that their organization has been the target of an APT,” said Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Risks can no longer be ignored or addressed with token changes to the status quo; instead, response must be immediate and adaptive. An effective approach is with network-based security monitoring designed to detect and analyze attack activity in real-time. Trend Micro is one of few vendors whose solutions fit this description; with the Custom Defense, it is enhancing its capabilities in attack detection and intelligence.”

While many organizations feel that they have been targeted, 67% admit that their current security activities are insufficient to stop a targeted attack, according to a January 2012 report by Ponemon Institute titled The Human Factor in Data Protection. Not surprisingly, 55% are not even aware of intrusions (Trend Micro research, 2012LM), and fewer know the extent of the attack or who exactly is behind it. While necessary to thwart the majority of today’s attacks, standard defenses have proven insufficient to handle APTs and targeted attacks; a custom attack requires a custom defense. This comprehensive solution also delivers custom insight about the specific threat and cybercriminals involved, giving organizations the vital information they need to fight back against their attackers.

As part of this announcement, Trend Micro is revealing enhancements to critical software components, its threat intelligence, as well as the availability of specialized tools and services – all of which are necessary for providing a complete custom defense.

Trend Micro Deep Discovery uniquely detects and identifies evasive threats in real-time, and provides the in-depth analysis and relevant actionable intelligence found at the heart of the Custom Defense solution. It has been enhanced to meet the growing demands of large enterprises and governments:

• Open: Delivers highly scalable, customer-defined sandboxing analysis that can be leveraged by other products
• Automated: Automatically shares IP/Domain blacklists with Trend Micro and third party products
• Scalable: Supports incremental capacity ranges up to 50,000 samples/day
• Lower TCO: Offers multiple form factors with the ability to start simply with a single device to monitor all network traffic types
• Infrastructure fit: Breadth of attack detection goes beyond Microsoft-targeting malware and identifies lateral movement, cross-port activity and privilege escalation

As part of the Custom Defense solution and for better protection across the network, Trend Micro is the first to integrate advanced threat detection capabilities into its mail gateway and server security products. Trend Micro™ ScanMail™Suite for Microsoft® Exchange™, Trend Micro™ ScanMail™ Suite for IBM® Lotus® Domino™, and Trend Micro™ InterScan™ Messaging Security have been integrated with Deep Discovery to send suspicious files for sandbox analysis and detection of previously unknown malware. In addition, these products feature a new exploit detection engine that identifies email attachments that contain exploits for vulnerabilities in major Adobe, Microsoft Office and other programs and blocks or quarantines them, furthering the level of protection provided.

All Trend Micro protection products will integrate more tightly with the adaptive updates of Deep Discovery. Additional product integrations are planned and will be announced at a later date.

The Trend Micro Smart Protection Network cloud security infrastructure rapidly and accurately identifies new threats, delivering global threat intelligence to secure data wherever it resides. It looks in more places for threat data, and uses big data analytics to deliver actionable threat intelligence across mobile, physical, virtual and cloud environments.

The Threat Connect information portal is accessible via Deep Discovery. It has been enhanced to provide the full breadth of relevant Trend Micro threat intelligence about specific threats – aiding in the rapid assessment, containment and remediation of an attack.

For more than two decades, Trend Micro has been helping its customers effectively identify and remediate targeted cyber-attacks with tools and services that enable Trend Micro support engineers to discover and analyze advanced threats in mail stores and network traffic, as well as for searching log files for traces of attack activity.  Proven effective for incident response and forensics, these tools are now being made available to the Trend Micro partner ecosystem, including, value-added resellers and service providers.