FireEye Educates Government Agencies to Help Defend Against Botnet Cyber Crime

Business Wire,  June 2, 2008  

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FireEye Experts Share Botnet Intelligence through Speaking Engagements at Federal Government Events GFIRST and FISC

MILPITAS, Calif. -- FireEye, Inc., the leader in global anti-botnet protection, brings a new urgency and clarity to the botnet pandemic for government agencies combating stealthy cyber crime perpetrated by criminals exploiting networks of compromised, remotely controlled PCs. FireEye has been selected to speak at the 4th Annual Government Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (GFIRST) National Conference, being held June 1-6, 2008 in Orlando, Fla. and the Federal Information Security Conference (FISC) being held July 1-2, 2008 in Colorado Springs, Colo.

By compromising and gaining control over computers to create their armies of "bots," cyber criminals can execute any number of fraudulent online activities including intellectual property theft, phishing scams, and massive DDoS extortion attacks, all designed to generate recurring revenue and wreak havoc on their targets. Government agencies face many of the same challenges as the private sector in combating botnets: increasingly sophisticated attacks, ineffective security countermeasures, and limited IT resources and personnel. They have the added responsibility of creating and enforcing legislation to fight botnets and stealth Web malware while protecting individuals' and organizations' property and privacy rights. The Cyber Security Enhancement Act and the I-SPY Act are two examples of new legislation passed to simplify and clarify parameters and penalties for computer crimes and cyber criminals.

"The explosion of Web malware is fueling botnet activity, giving cyber criminals new access points to infiltrate target machines without detection and driving new urgency into anti-botnet initiatives within the public sector," said Ashar Aziz, founder and CEO of FireEye, Inc. "FireEye has an established presence in supporting these initiatives working with the government. As a corporate associate of InfraGard, an FBI program designed to bridge the gap between private sector and the FBI, we continually promote information sharing among private companies and government agencies to further the cyber-protection discussion and help these customers win the war on botnets."

Despite best practices including firewalls, antivirus, vulnerability assessment and intrusion detection systems, today's security technologies have not been successful in keeping malware out. In these two speaking engagements, FireEye focuses on anti-botnet detection and prevention with methodologies including network forensics, used to acquire actionable botnet intelligence, and virtual machine replay, used to improve the accuracy and efficiency of existing security tools.

At GFIRST, Harold Stonebraker, systems engineer at FireEye, discusses leveraging network forensics best practices, policies, and procedures in order to help IT and security professionals avoid common incident response errors. The discussion will take into account restoral versus forensics approaches to incident response; security, business and compliance trends; and current best practices to support incident response initiatives. The session, "Incident Response and Network Forensics: Avoiding Common IR Errors," will be held as part of the Incident Response Track from 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday, June 3 at the Caribe Royale Orlando in Orlando, Fla.

This will be the fourth annual Government Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (GFIRST) National Conference presented by US-CERT. The Conference theme "Uniting the Cyber Response Community" will present opportunities for the cyber responder community to explore vital areas such as: control systems security, internet disruption, integrating cyber and emergency management, Web 2.0 security challenges, intelligence fusion and information sharing practices between Federal, State, and local cyber and law enforcement officials and private sector leaders. More information can be found at http://www.us-cert.gov/GFIRST/.

At FISC 2008, Dr. Michael J. Staggs, chief investigator at FireEye, will discuss some of the limitations of generally accepted security best practices in light of the current botnet threat landscape. The discussion will introduce security concepts that use virtual machines to eliminate false positives and streamline the security infrastructure while freeing critical IT personnel resources. The session, "Best Practices for Security: Moving Beyond the Checklist," will be held from 1:30 - 2:45 p.m. on Wednesday, July 2 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The seventh annual FISC will focus on the security policies and controls needed to meet secure requirements, explore the technologies created to assist with compliance and review situations where the combination of policy and technology resulted in successful Information Security management. FISC 2008 will feature 13 new session topics: security initiatives, security controls, security compliance, SCAP: security content automation protocol, enterprise mobility, email security, VOIP, data security, information sharing, security awareness, incident response, web application protection, and privacy. More information can be found at http://www.fbcinc.com/fisc/.