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Release 2 Innovations: Defense Against Malicious Attacks
Wayne Wheeles, CEORelease 2 Innovations' journey and how the company was established.
When we started the company in 2014, we recognized that the majority of the existing vendors in the cybersecurity space were fixated on spreadsheets of “good IPs” and “bad IPs.” Meanwhile, businesses are primarily interested in cost-effective measures for identifying and confronting threats. Consequently, Release 2 Innovations created solutions that de-emphasized traditional approaches to network security, opting instead to build more cost-effective solutions that amplified the effectiveness of customers’ existing security investments. Cyber is a classic business closure problem: more effective identification, classification and remediation of threats. Using our products, customers can confront three times as many threats with increased accuracy in the same period, resulting in a much more cost-effective model.
Elaborate on how services provided by Release 2 Innovations can help clients.
Our services portfolio is based on two decades’ worth of experience addressing the cybersecurity challenges of enterprises of all sizes. Our flagship offering is the Passive Perimeter Evaluation (PPE), a comprehensive evaluation which provides customers with a report card on the current state of their network defenses and controls:
- Dark Web Evaluation – An analysis of Dark Web sources to determine whether or not a client’s information has been compromised.
- Perimeter Evaluation – A comprehensive assessment of vulnerabilities and assessment of an organization’s security posture.
- Social Engineering Evaluation - An overview of information that can be determined about a network using tools and techniques commonly used by individual, state-sponsored, and state-run adversaries.
The process and tools delivering the PPE are built on five decades of applied experience in the domains of cybersecurity, threat intelligence, and network operations. The PPE provides our clients with actionable recommendations and observations to improve their enterprise security profile.
The PPE is just one of the services R2i provides to offer customers a 360° view of their enterprise.R2i is working to provide a holistic view for our customers. Using our Dark Web monitoring service, businesses can determine what data has been compromised and provide mitigation strategies for the enterprise.
The PPE is performed using the tools, techniques, and drop locations which are commonly used by individual, state-sponsored, and state-run adversaries.
The second product that we offer is Musubu®, a Japanese word for “the point where all things come together in peace and harmony”; it represents precise analytics that we have put together over the past years coupled with the best data feeds producing holistic offerings similar to Amazon’s Alexa. Musubu® is the premiere Threat Intelligence Engine for protecting your enterprise in the Age of the Internet of Things (IOT). Musubu® provides our clients the ability to monitor every part of their network providing previously unimaginable insight into network of origin, ransomware cyber-criminals, Dark Web cyber-criminals, and other malicious cyber-entities.
Tell us about the different features of the products offered by your organization.
Known Networks® is one of our biggest game changers when we talk about disruptive technology. We have created a high-res map about the internet which is updated every six days and provides 98 percent coverage of the entire spectrum. Known Networks® offers a platform for building innovative network information solutions and services based on a vast repository of information about global networks and the structure of the internet. Known Networks® allows developers, researchers, security analysts, and insider threat specialists to incorporate information about networks directly into their products and services. Our Data Science staff continually updates Know Networks’ underlying models using cutting edge machine learning tools, leading to meaningful improvements in value. We aggregate and analyze megabytes of data every day about what is knowable regarding network characteristics - all of which requires extensive cleaning and cross-correlation. Release 2 Innovations created the Known Networks® data product after realizing that there was a real need for their customers, both government and commercial, to accurately identify and characterize networks within the context of the entire internet. Known Networks® enables powerful filtering not otherwise possible by combining customer’s existing cyber data with relevant and timely enriched data. This allows our clients to increase their efficiency by up to 60% and allows their staff to focus on the true threats to the enterprise.
Known Networks® is one of our biggest game changers when we talk about disruptive technology. We have created a high-res map about the internet which is updated every six days and provides 98 percent coverage of the entire spectrum
Our third product is a comprehensive threat data feed that covers 19 different threat vectors with over three years of historical coverage. Additionally, the threat feed covers public/ non-public anonymous proxy network information; other commercial lists only detail advertised anonymous proxy nodes, but R2i actively acquires hidden bridges. Ransomware threat data is also included with the R2i threat feed which is especially useful for healthcare organizations and helps defend against those attacks and protect their PII data. The R2i threat feed provides our clients with the most comprehensive, up-to-date threat data facing their enterprise today.
Can you share a case study where Release 2 Innovations addressed a key challenge faced by a client?
Using R2i products, a large manufacturing company was able to process 742.6M network events in a matter of hours. R2i was able to filter out false positives and non-actionable threats, reducing the number of events to be analyzed to a few thousand saving the client days of unnecessary analysis.
Also using our ransomware threat data, we assisted a healthcare organization in blocking thousands of ransomware attacks on their system, resulting in a remediation cost avoidance of $750K - $1M.
What are your future plans for Release 2 Innovations?
Over the years we have transformed traditional approaches with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Recently, we released the first global map of cryptocurrency with the latest data set for Known Networks®. We are currently curating data sets and working through machine learning components and evaluating different artificial intelligence solutions to incorporate into our Known Networks® product. We are also looking forward to increasing partnerships in 2018, while continually providing the best defense services to our clients.
