Last week, Cisco unveiled Hypershield, a cutting-edge security solution designed to address “unknown vulnerabilities” in the cybersecurity landscape. In today’s security realm, when new vulnerabilities are discovered, they are reported to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database for software vendors to patch and update. However, dealing with CVE discovery and patching has become increasingly complex. Meanwhile, there are still security vulnerabilities that software vendors are unaware of, which can be exploited by silent hacker groups.
Enter Cisco Hypershield, a new security solution that tackles the challenge of protecting known vulnerabilities that are too numerous to manage and those that are previously unknown.
The principle behind Hypershield is to meticulously analyze the application’s behavior by installing an agent that scrutinizes every aspect of the application, including processes, I/O calls, file read-writes, network communications, and more, to truly understand its functionalities.
Cisco utilizes eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology, popular in the open-source world (known as Cilium), to capture all types of application data more comprehensively. Isovalent, a company developing eBPF and Cilium software, was recently acquired by Cisco at the end of 2023.
The Cisco Tesseract Security Agent collects and analyzes detailed application data, a task once considered a dream in the security industry but now made possible with DPU (data processing unit) technology for hardware-level processing and AI models developed in collaboration with NVIDIA for software analysis.
Once detailed application behavior data is gathered, Hypershield can implement a variety of security measures, such as autonomous segmentation to prevent system-wide attacks, distributed exploit protection to handle known vulnerabilities and update processes automatically, and protection against unknown vulnerabilities.
TLDR:
Cisco introduced Hypershield, a novel security solution that addresses both known and unknown vulnerabilities with advanced technology and thorough application analysis.
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