The bundled offering, which will go to market through the companies’ joint channel partners, is seen as a particularly strong offering in ICS and IoT environments.

Rosanna Pellegrino, Digital Defense’s Senior VP of Sales and Business Development

Vulnerability assessment platform provider Digital Defense and deception technology specialist Attivo Networks have announced an integration of Digital Defense’s platform with Attivo’s BOTsink solution. The bundled offering, which will be delivered through the companies’ joint channel partners, will improve the deployment of deception technology assets to protect identified vulnerabilities. The companies see it as particularly well suited to Internet of Things environments.

“This is a very strategic partnership for us,” said Rosanna Pellegrino, Digital Defense’s Senior VP of Sales and Business Development. “We engage in partnerships with best-of-breed companies that help organizations solve a specific business use case, and this is one of those. Deception technology is a different kind of technology from ours, but is a complementary way to approach solving a business problem. This is our first partnering with Attivo.”

The Digital Defense’s Frontline.Cloud vulnerability management and threat assessment platform uses vulnerability scanning to identify, in real time, high-risk assets with business context that are highly vulnerable to exploits, remain unpatched, or are unpatchable. This is a particular problem in ICS networks and critical infrastructure, where patching can be difficult because of limited access, minimal maintenance windows or the lack of an available patch at all for a known vulnerability. The platform lets security teams focus on identifying and prioritizing the most important assets, to proactively harden them against an attack without requiring agents.

“Vulnerability management identifies those assets in your environment which can’t be patched and which therefore become exposed,” Pellegrino said. “Deception technology decoys threats from these unpatchable assets so that they can be protected. The biggest problem people have in deploying deception technology is where to deploy the assets. What this integration does is help them correlate all the information within their platform and indicate specifically where the assets need to go.” This, in turn, enhances the ability of the deception assets to misdirect attackers and provides more time to detect, analyze and stop them.

Pellegrino said that Attivo was particularly well suited for Digital Defense to choose as an integration partner.

“Attivo stands out in the deception technology space because their technology  and their API are more mature,” she stated. “Some of the vendors in this space don’t have APIs and can’t do API integrations. They want to do it at the database level, with a lot of manual intervention. Why bother with that? We also found that it was very simple to create use cases using their solution.”

Digital Defense has a hybrid go-to-market model, in which the focus has been moving more to the indirect side, and the direct business increasingly becoming legacy direct customers. They work with both MSSPs and VARs, with a preference for focused security specialists. The integration with Attivo is constructed to go to market through partners.

“It is very much a ‘meet in the channel,’ approach,” Pellegrino said. “We both sell indirect through channel partners and we have a number of strategic mutual channel partners. They will create a bundled offering and sell it to customers.”