Morphisec Awarded by Department of Homeland Security for Development of Enhanced Moving Target Defense for Virtual Systems
Company’s First U.S. Federal Project to fuel innovation in preventing advanced attacks in financial systems without reducing VDI performance
BE’ER SHEVA, ISRAEL and BOSTON, MA – October 3, 2018 – Morphisec, the leader in Moving Target Defense, announced today that it has received an award from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) to extend, deploy, test and evaluate a Moving Target Defense (MTD)-based cybersecurity solution for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.
The project objective is the development of a product that will prevent attacks to financial institutions without reducing the overall performance of VDI environments. The award is part of the DHS S&T’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP) and the first award in the Financial Services Cyber Security Active Defense Technologies category to an international company.
“We are extremely happy to be working with DHS S&T on this critical initiative so we can help improve how we defend and secure rapidly-evolving hybrid computing systems,” said Ronen Yehoshua, CEO of Morphisec. “Moving Target Defense is a crucial technology in preventing ever-evolving cyberattacks that threaten organizations daily and pose a particular danger to VDI environments which can be complex to protect. This is the first federal project and an important milestone for Morphisec – how fitting that it is with DHS S&T, one of the earliest institutions to single out Moving Target Defense as a critical defense approach for cybersecurity.”
VDI use has grown significantly over the past two years, across enterprise, government and mid-market environments. According to Gartner, the VDI market was some $770 million in 2017[1] and VDI-based desktops account for approximately 10% of the total number of desktops deployed in enterprises, representing hundreds of millions of machines, both fully virtual and physical with virtualized desktop and workspace software deployed. This will only increase as virtualization sub-markets consolidate - the global virtual infrastructure software market today sits at $5.26 billion, and is expected to reach $15.3 billion by 2023.
"Today, endpoint security is not just about putting agents on physical machines to block and monitor – it’s also become essential to deliver protection across dynamic, sophisticated virtual environments that are often left unprotected," said Doug Cahill, Sr. Analyst, ESG global. "In our recent endpoint security survey, we found that nearly two-thirds of enterprise security personnel consider security virtual workplace environments as a high priority. This maps to the growing concern that protecting the endpoint brings in elements of web access, web isolation, and being flexible enough to secure pooled sessions."
Morphisec’s objective is to deliver a radically enhanced, never-seen-before preventative solution against targeted, zero-days and advanced attacks across VDI environments. The company will develop an MTD-based solution that randomly changes different areas of a VDI environment’s memory, including locations and layouts. This will increase the uncertainty and complexity of attacking the system, thus reducing the window of opportunity and increasing the cost of attack efforts. The proposed solution will use negligible resources and will not require a single signature, indicator of compromise (IOC) or any prior knowledge of the attack it’s facing to comprehensively prevent the threat from executing.
Learn more about the DHS Science and Technology Directorate SVIP .
[1] Gartner, Market Share Analysis: Virtualization Infrastructure Software, Worldwide, 2017, (June 27, 2018)
About Morphisec
Morphisec offers an entirely new level of innovation to customers in its Endpoint Threat Prevention platform, delivering protection against the most advanced cyberattacks. The company’s patented Moving Target Defense technology prevents threats others can’t, including APTs, zero-days, ransomware, evasive fileless attacks and web-borne exploits. Morphisec provides a crucial, small-footprint memory-defense layer that easily deploys into a company’s existing security infrastructure to form a simple, highly effective, cost-efficient prevention stack that is truly disruptive to today’s existing cybersecurity model.
For more information, visit www.morphisec.com.
Morphisec Media Contact:
Meghan Windle, Racepoint Global
617-624-3419
mwindle@racepointglobal.com
