Fergie's Tech Blog

In-Q-Tel Invests in FireEye

J. Nicholas Hoover writes on InformationWeek:

The independent venture arm of the U.S. intelligence community, In-Q-Tel, has invested in cybersecurity company FireEye, the company announced Wednesday.

In-Q-Tel and FireEye didn't disclose terms of the agreement, or which intelligence agencies are particularly interested in the technology. However, in a release, they said that the investment "will extend FireEye's cyber security product development and stealth malware technical capabilities to protect against cyber threats."

The intelligence community has a clear interest in cybersecurity investment. At a conference earlier this month, deputy secretary of defense William Lynn said that more than 100 foreign intelligence agencies are actively trying to hack into federal government systems. The NSA recently announced plans to build a $1.5 billion cybersecurity data center in Utah.

California-based FireEye sells an out-of-band security appliance that monitors all inbound network traffic, employing a blend of signatures and heuristics to analyze traffic for evidence of suspicious behavior. After identifying suspicious traffic, the appliance captures and replays the traffic on virtual machines running in the appliance, which imitate real PCs. If those PCs are compromised, FireEye alerts administrators. By routing the traffic to a virtual machine, FireEye claims it is able to mitigate false positives. The virtual machines are invisible to the customer's production network.

posted by Fergie @ 11/18/2009 12:49:00 PM