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McAfee and A10 Networks Secure the Network Edge Against Modern Attacks

McAfee recently announced updates to their partnership program, particularly, the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance (SIA). With SIA, customers can benefit from highly interoperable and integrated security solutions that work together to provide a better defense against rising, and evolving, cyber-attacks.

A10 Networks, with its Thunder SSLi® (SSL Insight) solution, has joined the McAfee SIA program, working seamlessly with McAfee’s Network Security Platform (NSP) in order to provide a complete, fool-proof security solution.

Encryption Can Expose Your Network to Modern Cyber Threats

Encryption can be a double-edged sword. As we have discussed before, encryption can preserve user privacy and prevent snooping attacks. However, it can introduce security issues since traditional security solutions are not able to decrypt and inspect all traffic. Given that there has been a rise in encryption of internet traffic with over 90% of the internet being encrypted, this problem becomes worse. Due to such high rates of encryption, organizations are facing new security challenges.

Some security solutions have been implementing decryption on an ad-hoc basis via software patches and upgrades. However, since they are not primarily designed to decrypt and encrypt traffic at high speeds, they can create bottlenecks in the network, causing costly network outages. Distributed decryption can also introduce multiple points of failure into the network as private keys and certificates would have to be distributed across multiple devices and decryption would have to be performed repeatedly for each device.

To counter all these issues, dedicated and centralized decryption solutions like, A10’s SSL Insight, are employed, so that they can enable and enhance the security and performance of enterprise networks.

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A10 Thunder SSLi Helps McAfee NSP To Stop Encrypted Malware

Thunder SSLi is a dedicated and centralized decryption solution that intercepts all network traffic going out of, and coming into, the network, decrypts all the encrypted traffic at high speeds and sends it across multiple security devices within the “secure decrypt zone.” Since full visibility is one of the key requirements of the Zero Trust paradigm, Thunder SSLi sits at the center of the Zero Trust model, enabling other Zero Trust security solutions with complete visibility, regardless of where the traffic is coming from or going to.

The McAfee NSP, which is placed within the secure decrypt zone, can benefit from SSL Insight’s high-speed decryption by inspecting all traffic in cleartext for any hidden (previously encrypted) malware, ransomware or other malicious intrusions, making sure that no unauthorized data extraction is taking place.

The same process is followed for outgoing as well as incoming traffic, ensuring that McAfee NSP has complete visibility into all traffic and that no encrypted intrusion can take place. In highly dynamic environments, if traffic levels increase and additional security tools are needed, A10 can provide load balancing among multiple security devices to help scale the solution according to the needs of the organization.

With the SSL Insight and McAfee NSP joint solution, users can:

  • Gain full visibility into network activities, encrypted or otherwise, making sure no cyber attacks make it through to their network and sensitive assets
  • Quickly detect and block advanced, stealthy threats at a scale that compliments high-performance, dynamic environmentsPerform
  • advanced threat detection that goes beyond simple signature-based malware analysis
  • Reduce operational costs and increase their ROI

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