AppSense Discloses View on New Internet Explorer Vulnerability: Are Security Company Announcements Really Protecting Us? Proactive Prevention is the Only Effective Solution.

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Situation:

A new and potentially damaging vulnerability has been exposed in Internet Explorer. (See news article http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_11-6115966.html?tag=sas.email)

AppSense's view:

This Internet Explorer vulnerability was announced just following Microsoft patch Tuesday. This is becoming more and more of a habit these days. The patches come out and a new vulnerability is announced right afterward--a vulnerability that now has an entire month to be exploited and cause chaos before it can be fixed by Microsoft. This is beyond a coincidence.

Also, the announcement was made by security company Xsec. This causes us to question the extent to which companies that publish vulnerabilities, such as these, are actually protecting customers and how much they are leaving them open to attack. As Martin Ingram, VP Product Management, AppSense, says, "With friends like these people, you do not need enemies."

Searching for vulnerabilities is equal measures of art, science and old-fashioned hard work. Techniques such as fuzzing, to automate the search for vulnerabilities, have been in the news recently but in reality they automate only some of the process. This vulnerability release was, by all accounts, pre-meditated.

Disclosures such as this one are becoming untenable, where the people that you expect to protect you are actually leaving you open to attack. In this new world where we do not have advance warning of the nature of an attack, our defenses must become proactive. Only solutions that do not require updates or patches to provide protection can defend us against the unknown.

About AppSense:

AppSense is the leading provider of application-level endpoint security solutions for the enterprise - proactively protecting desktops, laptops, servers, virtual systems and embedded devices against all forms of malicious software and preserving endpoint environments in their optimal state to ensure system integrity. AppSense software secures thousands of organizations and is installed on hundreds of thousands of desktops and servers across the world in mid-to-large organizations and across many industries such as Public Sector, Finance, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare.

AppSense solutions automatically and proactively block all unknown or untrusted applications from running on an endpoint without ever having to know the source or nature of the application (i.e., whether it is an unauthorized software or malicious software) or if malicious, what its signature file looks like or how it behaves. It controls when/where approved applications can execute, what functions within those applications users can access, and can even control access to endpoint devices, like USB memory sticks, which can be used to compromise an enterprise's critical data.

AppSense operates through a world-wide channel of certified partners with offices in the US, UK, Germany, The Netherlands and Australia. For more information visit: www.appsense.com