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IBM has unveiled what it describes as "a powerful appliance" for helping organisations diagnose and defend their critical data and enterprise networks against sophisticated external attacks and unauthorised insider activities.

As data breaches continue to impact organisations, the need to reduce detection time and investigate these threats before they can significantly impact the business is critical. Cyber criminals often gain access to a corporate network weeks or months before actual data is compromised. According to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Quarterly, in 2013 more than half a billion records of personally identifiable information were leaked through a number of attacks against strategic targets. By detecting malicious activity earlier, organisations can more quickly stop, or reduce the potential loss of data.

STEPS RETRACED
IBM Security QRadar Incident Forensics, a new software product designed as a module for the QRadar Security Intelligence Platform, can help security teams retrace the step-by-step actions of sophisticated cyber criminals. By adding this forensics capture and search module to its QRadar Security Intelligence platform, IBM can further strengthen its clients' abilities to efficiently investigate security incidents and understand the impact of any suspicious activity. QRadar Incident Forensics provides a record of activity on the network, enabling organisations to retrace suspicious activity, provide alerts to growing concerns, and provide forensics search capabilities.

"Every breach is a race against time. This new forensics module further expands the breadth and depth of IBM's security intelligence capabilities," says Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM Security Systems. "QRadar Incident Forensics further helps IT staff prevent emerging threats and better determine the impact of any intrusion."

IBM Security QRadar Incident Forensics will help any member of an IT security team quickly and efficiently research security incidents or test for conditions associated with an observed attack pattern from an Internet threat intelligence feed such as X-Force. By using this guidance, security teams can avoid spending valuable time searching through petabytes of network traffic, and potentially discovering nothing of immediate value. With QRadar, security analysts can quickly collect security data related to an incident.

This solution is just one of IBM's new initiatives to expand its security intelligence capabilities. In the second quarter of 2014, IBM will introduce new capabilities to help organisations better understand the threat landscape. IBM Advanced Cyberthreat Intelligence Service will provide customers with insight into the threat landscape, targeted attacks and attacker tools, tactics and practices, incorporating IBM's own research with that of strategic partners specialising in threat visibility.

Additionally, IBM's Active Threat Assessment complements this ongoing threat intelligence and visibility. It leverages technical assessment capabilities and best-of-breed tools to identify previously unrealised, active threats while also modeling threats to unmitigated vulnerabilities in an enterprise environment.

IBM Security QRadar Incident Forensics, currently planned to be available in the second quarter of 2014, is an integrated module in IBM's QRadar Security Intelligence platform. Also part of this announcement, IBM is now allowing existing QRadar clients to test this solution as part of a beta program.

KEY QUESTIONS
Meanwhile, in a world where a week rarely goes by without reports of at least one serious cyber attack against a major organisation, it's important to ask a few searching questions, advises IBM in its 'IBM Security Services Cyber Security Intelligence Index*:

• What's happening across the threat landscape?
• What kinds of attacks are being launched?
• How many of those attacks result in incidents requiring investigation?

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