American security experts launch Sydney R&D lab

US-based multinational Arbor Networks has opened a new research and development (R&D) centre in Sydney, led by the staff of an Australian start-up it acquired in September.

"In the Asia-Pacific region, Sydney is now the largest R&D presence," vice president of engineering for Arbor Networks Kris Lamb told CRN. "We have a small lab in India but [Sydney] is the most strategic by size and importance."

The new facilities are dominated by talent from Packetloop, a Sydney security software firm that Arbor purchased a few months ago. Lamb said the growth in Sydney had been aggressive since the buyout.

"Within 45 days of the acquisition, we went from five people to 15 staff," said Lamb. "The goal by the end of the year is 15-20 here, and the office can accommodate up to 30 people in the next couple of years."

Packetloop co-founder Scott Crane, now Arbor's product management director, told CRN that the channel will feature heavily in Arbor's Australian push.

"It's an enterprise product so we want to grow the channel business," he said. "Tyson [Garrett, co-founder of Packetloop and Arbor's director of Channel and Alliances] is working very hard for the channel."

Packetloop became prominent for analysing network packets for harmful activity. That function has been integrated into Arbor's recently launched Pravail Security Analytics, which is currently available in software form.

Arbor is known for its Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection appliances. Lamb told CRN that virtual machine and network appliance forms of Pravail Security Analytics would be released within the next few weeks.

Crane told CRN that the cultural crossover between Packetloop and Arbor had ensured a smooth transition.

"The culture of business is almost identical," he said. "There is a similar approach to work and enjoying success – the same sort of desire to innovate and create."

Next: First product lauched out of Packetloop buyout

Arbor Networks has released the first product to come from their acquisition of Sydney-based startup Packetloop in September last year.

The product is an advanced threat detection, incident response and security forensics system called Pravail Security Analytics.

Pravail Security Analytics is built on Arbor’s ATLAS – Active Threat Level Analysis System. ATLAS is a collaboration of nearly 300 service providers who share anonymous data with Arbor, up to 70TB/sec of global Internet traffic. This collective view delivers globally scoped insight into the attack landscape.

The data is analysed by Arbor’s security research team who then develops detection methodologies. They create fingerprints that identify threats and malicious activity.

Arbor says that with attackers now using stealthy and sophisticated methods to penetrate an organisation’s perimeter, the indicators of compromise are often impossible to identify before it’s too late. By using this data, Arbor claims they can understand subtle, advanced targeted attacks, enterprises.

As well as being used for real-time attack response decisions, Pravail Security can be used to identify previously undetected attacks using the latest threat intelligence.

General availability of the Pravail Security Analytics on-premise Collector solution is planned for 30 April this year.