Minerva debuts enterprise-grade malware vaccination offering to immunize endpoints; contain attacks

Minerva, provider of anti-evasion technology, released Tuesday its initial  Endpoint Malware Vaccination module for enterprises. As part of their Anti-Evasion Platform, this new tool helps simulate infection markers across enterprise endpoints to deceive malware into believing it has already infected the system. This approach allows Minerva’s customers to prevent infections even if other defensive capabilities were unable to block the attack.

Minerva was recently granted a patent for their technology layer that forms the Anti-Evasion Platform. The addition of Endpoint Malware Vaccination to Minerva’s solution builds upon this patent and reinforces the way in which the company protects against malware designed to evade existing security tools.

Building upon its core capability to deceive malware into inaction, Minerva has taken the concept of vaccination beyond simply a “cool idea” for lab environments and allowed this technique to be deployed at an enterprise level to expand the endpoint defender’s arsenal.

Benefits of the new Endpoint Malware Vaccination tool include reduced detection time; ability to contain attacks automatically; and collect forensic details. By using Minerva to simulate the infection marker, the organization is not only alerted when malware attempts to access the marker, but also automatically blocks the attack.

By deploying infection markers across all Minerva-protected endpoints, the enterprise can prevent the corresponding malware variants from spreading, with minimal human intervention. It also collects forensics details about malware that was prevented by the vaccination to enrich threat intelligence.

“While the idea of malware vaccination has gained some traction among security professionals, deploying infection markers at an enterprise-scale has not been feasible to date. This is because generating these artifacts the traditional way doesn’t scale and can be intrusive on the endpoint, potentially impacting the system’s performance and conflicting with other security tools,” said Lenny Zeltser, Vice President of Products, Minerva. “In contrast, Minerva’s ability to simulate, rather than actually create, infection markers allows us to be highly selective regarding how and when we reveal the presence of the vaccine. This enables Minerva to vaccinate endpoints without cluttering the system with unnecessary artifacts, without interfering with legitimate applications and without affecting end-users.”

“Security professionals are used to thinking about indicators of compromise (IOCs) as a way of solely detecting infections after they have taken place,” continued Zeltser. “What Minerva delivers with this new tool is an innovative way of turning some IOC attributes into a preventative measure that allows enterprises to avoid infections in the first place by deploying vaccines when appropriate.”


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