Gigamon announces the availability of its new Precryption technology

Issue 7 2023 Information Security, Security Services & Risk Management

Gigamon recently announced a series of breakthrough cybersecurity innovations to the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline in its latest GigaVUE 6.4 software release. Gigamon Precryption technology enables IT and security organisations, for the first time with an automated solution, to gain unobscured visibility into encrypted traffic across virtual machine (VM) or container workloads, to conduct advanced threat detection, investigation, and response across the hybrid cloud infrastructure.

While intended for security and privacy, encryption has become a hiding place for cybercriminals, with over 93% of malware now lurking behind encryption. With this announcement, Gigamon is helping IT organisations eliminate these blind spots by shining a spotlight on this previously concealed threat activity inside encrypted traffic, reinforcing a strong foundation for Zero Trust.

Undetected threats in encrypted traffic

According to the recent Gigamon 2023 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey, over 70% of the 1000 IT and security leaders surveyed admit they currently do not inspect the encrypted data flowing across their hybrid cloud infrastructure. This presents grave business risk as encrypted data cannot be sufficiently analysed, and malware threats cannot be detected by security and monitoring tools alone as encrypted data traverses internally, externally, or laterally across an organisation.

Gigamon Precryption technology reveals previously concealed threat activity, including lateral movement, malware distribution, and data exfiltration inside virtual, cloud, and container applications. Its innovative approach leverages eBPF technology inside the Linux kernel to deliver plaintext visibility, capturing traffic before encryption or after decryption. No keys need to be intercepted or sniffed, and no expensive decryption is required. Moreover, Precryption technology runs independently of the application, avoiding the operational challenges of classic agent-based approaches.

“Global enterprises are increasingly successful with unifying security logs in a security data lake, but encrypted traffic poses a real challenge,” said Omer Singer, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy at Snowflake. “Industry advances like Gigamon Precryption technology present a compelling path for organisations to turn encrypted cloud traffic into visibility for better security and compliance across hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

Gigamon Precryption technology addresses a range of advanced security requirements, including:

• Easily enables InfoSec, Network, and CloudOps teams to gain full visibility into encrypted traffic across VM or container workloads.

• Seamlessly works with modern encryption methods, including TLS 1.3 or TLS 1.2 with perfect-forward secrecy (PFS) enabled, and legacy encryption methods, including TLS 1.2 without PFS.

• Fully supports organisations with sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) by masking this traffic from view to maintain data security, compliance, and governance.

• Dramatically reduces the operational complexity associated with decryption by eliminating cumbersome private key management for key sharing, passing, and library updates.

• Efficiently offloads TLS decryption overhead from cloud, security, and observability tools, greatly boosting their capacity and performance.

“In a recent study of large enterprise IT and security leaders, we found that an alarming 50% accept the risk and do not decrypt traffic today due to technical and cost challenges,” said Christopher Steffen, Vice President of Research at EMA. “At a time when organisations have a Zero Trust goal, it is clear that half have no hope of achieving it. It is time to pull visibility into encrypted traffic and out of the ‘too hard, impossible, and too expensive bucket’. With innovations like Gigamon Precryption technology, organisations can get the deep observability they need to meet evolving standards and regulatory compliance, and also confidently secure their hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

“As cloud adoption accelerates across an expanding number of private and public platforms, organisations must also address the escalating risks of threat activity concealed within encrypted traffic,” said Michael Dickman, Chief Product Officer at Gigamon. “Until now, decrypting cloud traffic has been arduous and expensive. With Gigamon Precryption technology, we are turning the tables on cybercriminals by bringing deep observability to encrypted traffic, allowing customers to dramatically improve their security posture across any number of clouds and workloads, without any burden on developers.”

Seamless security integration

The software release incorporates several more advanced security capabilities, including:

• Cloud SSL decryption – extending classic on-premises decryption capabilities to a wide range of virtual and cloud platforms.

• Universal Cloud Tap (UCT) – a single, executable tap for leading platforms, extending across VMs and containers with pre-filtering at the source for maximum efficiency.

• Application Metadata Intelligence (AMI) integration – detection of vulnerabilities and suspicious activities across both managed and unmanaged hosts (e.g., IoT devices).

Read the Gigamon 2023 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey at www.securitysa.com/*gigamon1




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