Australian security vendor beefs up its threat management system for London's Infosecurity show

Ahead of the Infosecurity Europe show this week, Australian security vendor Tier-3 has upgraded its Huntsman threat management system to version 4.5 and will launch it for the first time in the UK.

Huntsman has the ability to automatically detect both known threats and unknown attacks, said the firm. It can run on Linux, Solaris, Windows, HP-UX and AIX, while the forensic repository database holding rules, policies and events supports DB2, Oracle and SQL Server databases, as well as some of the open-source products such as MySQL.

“We’ve optimised the software to take into account the idiosyncrasies of each database,” said Tier-3 chief technology officer, Geoff Sweeney.

According to Sweeney, it often takes a number of weeks to set up the policies for other real-time threat management systems, and to analyse firms' networks to give them an initial view. However the Behavioural Anomaly Detection (BAD) system embedded in Huntsman can shorten this process considerably, he added.

"One of the key strengths of Huntsman is our BAD technology, it's a completely automated process,” Sweeney said. “People think it's feasible for an IT department to sit down and 'baseline' it's network, but no way is that possible. None of our customers tweak it – you can, but in reality people haven't got the time.”

Huntsman is aimed at large corporations and government departments with around 1,000 users and upwards, but Tier-3 said that it will scale up to hundreds of thousands of seats.

Sweeney pointed out that although a dual-processor system would be the minimum spec for Huntsman to run on, such a system "could run a 3,000 user organisation … without much difficulty." He added, "This kind of hardware is running the bulk of the Australian Defence Department’s 120,000-user network. You don't need monstrously powerful systems to run Huntsman."

Huntsman is generally used as a 24/7 service, and it can also integrate with management platforms such as OpenView and Tivoli, said Tier-3. Pricing starts at £50,000, based on a per-server cost.