![]() | John Chesson Chief Security Officer |
![]() | Dawid Van Der Merwe Senior Solutions Specialist at Sintrex Integration Services |
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
"One of the key advantages for us is we define a 24/7 service around it. We use far more of Vectra alerts than we do with our SIEM product because we understand that when we get an alert from Vectra we actually need to do something about it."
"It is doing some artificial intelligence. If it sees a server doing a lot of things, then it will assume that is normal. So, it is looking for anomalous behavior, things that are out of context which helps us reduce time. Therefore, we don't have to look in all the logs. We just wait for Vectra to say, "This one is behaving strange," then we can investigate that part."
"One of the most valuable features of the platform is its ability to provide you with aggregated risk scores based on impact and certainty of threats being detected. This is both applied to individual and host detections. This is important because it enables us to use this platform to prioritize the most likely imminent threats. So, it reduces alert fatigue follow ups for security operation center analysts. It also provides us with an ability to prioritize limited resources."
"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."
"It gives you access, with Recall, to instant visibility into your network through something like a SIEM solution. For us, being able to correlate all of this network data without having to manage it, has provided immediate value. It gives us the ability to really work on the stuff where I and my team have expertise, instead of having to manage a SIEM solution..."
"The solution provide visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack in our network, beyond just the Internet gateway. It makes our security operations much more effective because we are now looking not just at traffic on the border, but we're looking at east-west internal traffic. Now, not only will we see if an exploit kit is being downloaded, but we would be able to see then if that exploit kit was then laterally distributed into our environment."
"Vectra produces actionable data using automation. That has helped us. It's less manpower now to look at incidents, which has definitely increased efficiency. Right now, in a lot of cases, our mean time to detection is within zero days. This tells me by the time something happened, and we were able to detect it, it was within the same day."
"One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly."
"The query language makes it easy to query the records on the network, to do searches for the various threat activities that we're looking for. The dashboard, the Security Knowledge Graph, displays information meaningfully and easily. I am able to find the information that I want to find pretty quickly."
"Other solutions will say, "Hey, this device is doing something weird." But they don't aggregate that data point with other data points. With Awake you have what's called a "fact pattern." For example, if there's a smart toaster on the third floor that is beaconing out to an IP address in North Korea, sure that's bizarre. But if that toaster was made in North Korea it's not bizarre. Taking those two data points together, and automating something using machine-learning is something that no other solution is doing right now."
"This solution’s encrypted traffic analysis helps us stay in compliance with government regulations. It is all about understanding data exfiltration, what is ingressing and egressing in our network. One common attack vector is exfiltrating data using encryption. My capabilities to see potential data exfiltration over encrypted traffic is second to none now."
"This solution help us monitor devices used on our network by insiders, contractors, partners, or suppliers. Its correlation and identification of specific endpoints is very good, especially since we have a large, virtualized environment. It discerns this fairly well. Some of the issues that we have had with other tools is we sometimes are not able to tell the difference between users on some of those virtualized instances."
"We appreciate the value of the AML (structured query language). We receive security intel feeds for a specific type of malware or ransomware. AML queries looking for the activity is applied in almost real-time. Ultimately, this determines if the activity was not observed on the network."
"The security knowledge graph has been very helpful in the sense that whenever you try a new security solution, especially one that's in the detection and response market, you're always worried about getting a lot of false positives or getting too many alerts and not being able to pick out the good from the bad or things that are actual security incidents versus normal day to day operations. We've been pleasantly surprised that Awake does a really good job of only alerting about things that we actually want to look into and understand. They do a good job of understanding normal operations out-of-the-box."
"The most valuable portion is that they offer a threat-hunting service. Using their platform, and all of the data that they're collecting, they actually help us be proactive by having really expert folks that have insight, not just into our accounts, but into other accounts as well. They can be proactive and say, 'Well, we saw this incident at some other customer. We ran that same kind of analysis for you and we didn't see that type of activity in your network.'"
"Setting up the solution is relatively easy."
"We had useful information within the hour of deployment. The ability to trace back for historical analysis, as well as the behavioral analysis done with the security information, puts the user in a position to make an informed decision to mitigate the performance or security incidents. Regarding the security incidents, Reveal (x) is able to create incident cards that guide your teams through the incidents and gives you the option to delve into the transaction detail to potentially view payloads as well."
"The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit."
"We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events."
"You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks."
"One thing which I have found where there could be improvement is with regard to the architecture, a little bit: how the brains and sensors function. It needs more flexibility with regard to the brain. If there were some flexibility in that regard, that would be helpful, because changing the mode of the brain is complex. In some cases, the change is permanent. You cannot revert it."
"Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team."
"Some of their integrations with other sources of data, like external threat feeds, took a bit more work than I had hoped to get integrated."
"I would like to see a bit more strategic metrics instead of technical data. Information that I could show to my executive management team or board would be valuable."
"It does a little bit of packet capture on alert so you can look at the packet capture activity going on, but it doesn't collect a whole lot of data. Sometimes it's only one or two frames, sometimes it does collect more. That's why they have the addition of their Recall platform, because that really does help expand the capability."
"There's room for improvement with some of the definitions, because I don't have time and I'm not a Tier 4 analyst. I believe that is something they're working towards."
"I enjoy the query language, but it could be a bit more user-friendly, especially for new users who come across it... They should push it more into a natural language style as opposed to a query language."
"I would like to see a bit more in terms of encrypted traffic. With the advent of programs that live off the land, a smart attacker is going to leverage encryption to execute their operation. So I would like to see improvements there, where possible. Currently, we're not going to be decrypting encrypted traffic. What other approaches could be used?"
"I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this."
"Be prepared to update your SOPs to have your analysts work in another tool separately. There are some limitations in the integrations right now. One of the things that I want from a security standpoint is integration with multiple tools so I don't need to have my analysts logging into each individual tool."
"Awake Security needs to move to a 24/7 support model in the MNDR space. Once they do that, it will make them even better."
"They've been focused on really developing their data science, their ability to detect, but over time, they need to be able to tie into other systems because other systems might detect something that they don't."
"When I looked at the competitors, such as Darktrace, they all have prettier interfaces. If Awake could make it a little more user-friendly, that would go a long way."
"The solution is expensive and gets more expensive if a company needs to scale it."
"Netflow - Processing Netflow can be cumbersome as it requires triggers to truly gain value and insight. This in turn can add a bit of load to the hardware. The focus of ExtraHop Reveal (x) is live packet data."
"We are running at about 90,000 pounds per year. The solution is a licensed cost. The hardware that they gave us was pretty much next to nothing. It is the license that we're paying for."
"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"We have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy."
"At the time of purchase, we found the pricing acceptable. We had an urgency to get something in place because we had a minor breach that occurred at the tail end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. This indicated we had a lack of ability to detect things on the network. Hence, why we moved quickly to get into the tool in place. We found things like Bitcoin mining and botnets which we closed quickly. In that regard, it was worth the money."
"The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
"The pricing is high."
"The solution has saved thousands of dollars within the first day. Our ROI has to be in the tens of thousands of dollars since October last year."
"Awake Security was the least expensive among their competitors. Everyone was within $15,000 of each other. The other solutions were not providing the MNDR service, which is standard with Awake Security's pricing/licensing model."
"We switched to Awake Security because they were able to offer a model that was significantly less expensive and the value that we get out of it is higher."
"The solution is very good and the pricing is also better than others..."
Vectra® is the leader in network detection and response – from cloud and data center workloads to user and IoT devices. Its Cognito® platform accelerates threat detection and investigation using artificial intelligence to collect, store and enrich network metadata with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known and unknown threats in real time. Vectra offers three applications on the Cognito platform to address high-priority use cases. Cognito Stream™ sends security-enriched metadata to data lakes and SIEMs. Cognito Recall™ is a cloud-based application to store and investigate threats in enriched metadata. And Cognito Detect™ uses AI to reveal and prioritize hidden and unknown attackers at speed.
Awake Security is the only advanced network traffic analysis company that delivers a privacy-aware solution capable of detecting and visualizing behavioral, mal-intent and compliance incidents with full forensics context. Powered by Ava, Awake’s security expert system, the Awake Security Platform combines federated machine learning, threat intelligence and human expertise. The platform analyzes billions of communications to autonomously discover, profile and classify every device, user and application on any network. Through automated hunting and investigation, Awake uncovers malicious intent from insiders and external attackers alike. The company is ranked #1 for time to value because of its frictionless approach that delivers answers rather than alerts.
Reveal(x) provides the visibility, insights, and answers that security analysts need to respond quickly and confidently to the highest priority threats against their organization's critical assets. It starts by automatically discovering and classifying every device communicating across the network, and using machine-learning driven behavioral analysis to detect anomalous and malicious activity.
Your network may have security risks that you don't know about. Schedule a live demo to see how you can use Awake Security to identify and mitigate these threats.
Awake Security Platform is ranked 6th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 9 reviews while ExtraHop Reveal(x) is ranked 7th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 2 reviews. Awake Security Platform is rated 9.2, while ExtraHop Reveal(x) is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Awake Security Platform writes "The time from finding threats to remediation is almost instantaneous". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ExtraHop Reveal(x) writes "Enables users to make an informed decision to mitigate performance or security incidents". Awake Security Platform is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Stealthwatch, Corelight, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and Plixer Scrutinizer, whereas ExtraHop Reveal(x) is most compared with Darktrace, Corelight, Cisco Stealthwatch, RSA NetWitness Network and Rapid7 InsightIDR. See our Awake Security Platform vs. ExtraHop Reveal(x) report.
See our list of best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors and best Network Detection and Response (NDR) vendors.
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