Channel Post spoke to Simon Azzopardi, the Vice President for EMEA and APAC at Secunia to find out about the security threats landscape in the Middle East
What products and solutions does Secunia offer?
From a product standpoint, Secunia focuses on vulnerability intelligence and vulnerability management. We collect vulnerability information from over 45,000 applications worldwide, which run on operating systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, including Android mobile operating system.
Based on the information we generate through our intelligence probes, we Secunia issues advisories to its customers. Our customers then use this information to scan their networks and applications they use, in order to find out existing vulnerabilities and the patches available to plug those vulnerabilities. Our solution can also be integrated with Microsoft’s System Center or Symantec’s Altiris to apply patches onto their corporate networks.
What do you think is the USP of Secunia’s offerings?
Our unique ability is to know that such vulnerabilities exist in native applications and third-party applications and the way we let companies manage such vulnerabilities. According to the data we have published recently, about 86% of the vulnerabilities originate from third party applications such as Java, Adobe and so on. Secunia is today the only vendor invited by Microsoft to join the Security Alliance.
What sort of channel strategies does Secunia follow?
Secunia has now gone 100% channel. We started this transition in July this year. EMT is our distributor here in the Middle East region and we have started our process to look for and engage with partners and to promote our technologies and the company as a whole.
What is the security threats landscape like in the Middle East?
I think majority of the vulnerability is originating from rogue applications running on Android platforms. In addition, old versions of Java, end of life products and so on, on PCs are also a major source of vulnerabilities.
We recently released the first personal vulnerability scanner in Arabic in the region. The Personal Security Inspector (PSI) is now available for free, and is available in 8 languages including English and Arabic. Home users can protect themselves using PSI – it can be downloaded from this link. So end users can see what sort of vulnerabilties they might face and also set up PSI to automatically update their system in case patches are available.
The regional corporate sector is aware of such vulnerabilities. However, managing the vulnerability is a task. In addition, managing third party applications through mobile workers is a major challenge and hence solutions from Secunia can help them in monitoring and managing their devices and network in an efficient manner.
Our clients include companies from sectors such as oil and gas, banking, government and so on. Companies such as Evernote, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, and so on, rely on our products for vulnerability intelligence and management.
