Realistic Security, Realistically Deployed: Today's Application Control and Whitelisting

Historically, IT defense has focused largely on the threat. So-called "blacklist" technologies maintain an inventory of specific attack types, and provide defense against each.

Today, the volume, variety and sophistication of attacks highlights the limitations of such approaches, as signature databases approach their upper limits and leave exploitable gaps in defense. These changes in the threat landscape have led many organizations to consider the alternative to a blacklist approach. In contrast to blacklisting that identifies and blocks known threats, application control technologies such as whitelisting focus on recognizing legitimate functionality, and monitoring, containing or preventing all else.

In this whitepaper you will learn three key aspects of today's realistic application whitelisting technologies:

• They deliver a high degree of transparence, introducing little or no disruption in deployment and administration.
• They provide significant flexibility in policy definition and control.
• They can scale to meet the demands of the largest, most complex and highly distributed organizations, backed by the high-performance resources of cloud-based reputation analysis.