Trend Micro Unleashes Big Data Analytics and New, Advanced Capabilities in the Smart Protection Network

CUPERTINO, Calif., Aug. 7, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Trend Micro Inc. (TYO: 4704;TSE: 4704), the global leader in cloud security, today announced an expansion of the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™, the cloud-based security infrastructure introduced in 2008 that powers most of the company's products and services. The latest iteration of the Smart Protection Network incorporates advanced big data analytic capabilities that enable Trend Micro to identify new security threats across a broader range of data sources, delivering global threat intelligence that stops threats even faster than before.

These capabilities, especially crucial in the era of mobility, cloud adoption, and advanced persistent threats and targeted attacks, have been integrated into the Smart Protection Network in order to tackle the dramatic volume, variety, and velocity of threats. With this announcement, the Smart Protection Network now includes:  

• Newly added technologies, including mobile app reputation (for mobile threats), vulnerability rules (for vulnerability and exploits), network inspection rules (for network communications), and in-the-cloud whitelisting (for minimizing false positives). These combine with the Smart Protection Network's existing reputation technologies -- Web reputation, Email reputation, and File reputation – to further Trend Micro's global threat intelligence, one of the most comprehensive in the world. 
• New, custom tools to correlate critical relationships among all the components of an attack, and model cybercriminal behavior and the environments they work in to quickly determine whether something is good or bad.  This modeling allows Trend Micro to proactively identify new threats from the data streams using behavioral-based identification methods.  By correlating global threat intelligence across many threat vectors, Trend Micro delivers protection against the wide variety of attacks today.    
• An evolved cloud infrastructure, allowing for a greater capacity to collect massive amounts of threat data without consuming bandwidth on customers' networks and endpoints. Trend Micro was one of the first security companies to move beyond the conventional approach of resident protection and utilize the power of the cloud to block threats before they reach users. The Smart Protection Network provides automated protection through its cloud infrastructure enabling Trend Micro to protect customers across physical, mobile, virtual, and cloud environments.

Trend Micro customers benefit from these new capabilities, receiving real-time protection against today's threats through efficient and easy-to-manage security products such as Trend Micro Deep Security – the company's flagship product for physical, virtual and cloud environments; Trend Micro Deep Discovery –  an innovative Advanced Persistent Threat detection solution; and Trend Micro Titanium for consumer endpoint security.

The Threat Landscape: Then and Now

Today's threat environment means vendors have to deal with the 3Vs of threats: volume, variety, and velocity. Each of these is growing at an astounding rate and has required a shift in how security vendors manage today's threats, especially as cloud adoption, personal mobile device usage, and targeted cyber attacks increase. In 2008, Trend Micro identified one million malware samples, compared to 30 million unique threats Trend Micro is currently tracking for 2012. Mobile threats are also on the rise: In 2008, Trend Micro detected less than 100 threats designed for mobile devices; by comparison, in 2012, Trend Micro has already identified almost 27,000 new malicious apps for the Android platform alone. 

Within this new threat environment, the amount of data is also on the rise and constantly on the move -- from cloud to servers to endpoints to mobile devices. According to IDC, the amount of data needing protection will grow by a factor of 90 by 2020.  To address these trends, the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network enables organizations and individuals to take a more data-centric approach to security. Unlike traditional, perimeter-centric security, which assumed protectable boundaries surround critical data, the Smart Protection Network protects data wherever it resides.

The Smart Protection Network: Then and Now

With the introduction of the Smart Protection Network in 2008, Trend Micro marked a new approach to security where less reliance was placed on time-consuming pattern-downloads on the client, and more emphasis was placed on stopping threats at their source – in the cloud.  Trend Micro was one of the first security vendors to use cloud-based technology to block threats before they reach a network or endpoint. 

Since 2008, Trend Micro has continued to evolve and adapt the Smart Protection Network according to the changing threat landscape, and the way businesses and consumers use technology. The proof is in the numbers: In the beginning, the Smart Protection Network managed 5 billion URL, email, and file queries per day.  By 2012, that number has more than tripled to 16+ billion queries per day. Likewise, in 2008, the Smart Protection Network analyzed 1 terabyte of threat data daily, compared to the more than 6 terabytes of data it analyzes now. 

Today, the Smart Protection Network identifies and blocks over 200 million threats a day – that's over 2300 threats per second.  The cloud-based infrastructure, which identifies, correlates, and analyzes new threats, is backed by research labs in 12 regions around the globe, and 1200 security experts worldwide working on surveillance and prevention. 

Supporting quotes

Dan Schiappa, senior vice president, identity and data protection, RSA, The Security Division of EMC
"The ability to combat cybercriminals requires a far more purposeful collaboration within the industry – such as that between RSA and Trend Micro – and a strong security ecosystem focused on sharing actionable information and mitigating risk. Our RSA® FraudAction service which is designed to help give our customers early warning about a broad variety of cyber threats, leverages real-time global threat intelligence data about viruses, spyware, spam and other malware from the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network. Trend Micro's move to enhance and expand the Smart Protection Network will benefit our customers who rely on multiple sources of threat intelligence data to better understand and fight against multi-vector cyber threats."

Eva Chen, CEO, Trend Micro
"Since the launch of the Smart Protection Network in 2008, the threat landscape has shifted to now focus on mobility and targeted attacks. Threats and cybercriminal attacks have taken on an unprecedented level of volume, variety, and velocity. These changes demand a smarter, accelerated approach to security so that our customers can confidently embrace the mobile device and cloud-era, knowing their data is protected, no matter where it resides."

Availability
The next-generation Trend Micro Smart Protection Network is strategically integrated into all of Trend Micro products and services including mobile, endpoint, server, network, messaging, gateway, and SaaS offerings for consumers and businesses of all sizes. Today, 48 of the top 50 global corporations rely on Trend Micro's ability to collect, identify and protect through the Smart Protection Network and ensure the volume, velocity and variety of threat data is managed efficiently and effectively.

For those organizations that have limited bandwidth or are concerned with privacy, Trend Micro offers the Smart Protection Server, ensuring communications and queries stay within the local network.

New Trend Micro Threat Intelligence Services are also now available to very large enterprises, government organizations and other partners.  These services enable organizations to use actionable intelligence from the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network to build or enhance their security infrastructure for counteracting data breaches and other potential threats.

The Smart Protection Network also powers Trend Micro's free online tools:

• Trend Micro™ HouseCall™, an on-demand antivirus software scanner for identifying and removing viruses, trojans, worms, unwanted browser plugins, and other malware software.
• Trend Micro™ HouseCall™ for Mobile, which scans Android devices for infected, Trojanized and malicious apps. 
• Trend Micro™ Smart Surfing for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices, which provides a smarter, safer experience when surfing the web from an Apple device.
• Trend Micro™ ThreatWatch app for iPhone and Android aggregates and delivers threat intelligence news to a mobile device, giving security professionals, organizations and individuals an easy way to stay up to date on the latest threats right from their mobile devices. 

Supporting materials:

For more information about these products, contact your Trend Micro representative or channel partner or visit: http://www.smartprotectionnetwork.com.  

For more information about the Smart Protection Network, please visit the new landing page.

About Trend Micro
Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704;TSE: 4704), the global cloud security, creates a world safe for exchanging digital information with its Internet content security and threat management solutions for businesses and consumers.  A pioneer in server security with over 20 years' experience, we deliver top-ranked client, server and cloud-based security that fits our customers' and partners' needs, stops new threats faster, and protects data in physical, virtualized and cloud environments. Powered by the industry-leading Trend Micro Smart Protection Network cloud computing security infrastructure, our products and services stop threats where they emerge – from the Internet. They are supported by 1,000+ threat intelligence experts around the globe. 

Additional information about Trend Micro Incorporated and the products and services are available at Trend Micro.com. This Trend Micro news release and other announcements are available at http://newsroom.trendmicro.com/  and as part of an RSS feed at www.trendmicro.com/rss.   Or follow our news on Twitter at @TrendMicro.

SOURCE Trend Micro Incorporated