Anomali ThreatStream vs. Symantec Critical System Protection

Anomali ThreatStream is excellent in scenarios where we deliver Managed Security Services to customers. It offers exhaustive volumes of information in the form of threat bulletins, IOCs, Threat Actor profiling, and details related to campaigns in the wild which can be used to a great extent by MSSPs. For an enterprise SOC, I believe it is a little less suited purely because of the pricing aspect as it is slightly towards the expensive side of the spectrum.

Incentivized

Symantec Critical System Protection (CSP) is very well suited for environments that do not change such as point of sale systems and critical servers. This product is spectacular at protecting end of life operating systems when supporting legacy software prevents upgrades. When security updates are no longer available, CSP will prevent exploits and other malware from taking advantage. This product is not well suited for systems that require a lot of changes. For one, it does not notify when a change has been blocked by CSP, causing some server administrators to waste many hours chasing a phantom technical problem when turning off CSP could have solved it right away. Also, profiling takes time so systems that constantly change would need hundreds of exceptions made.

Incentivized

• Indicators of Compromise
• Signatures
• Community Sharing

Incentivized

• Data Center Security 6.0 and higher allows you to easily build out policies to deploy to monitor/block what is required/needed.
• The agent that is installed on the hosts has a small footprint in terms of CPU and memory usage.
• The ability to customize it anyway you need to as well as utilize out of the box policies to monitor critical OS functionality.

• The user interface, perhaps there is some room for improvement although it is good already.
• Confidence assigning process for IOCs needs to be more robust and transparent.
• While integration with SIEM solutions is a cakewalk, there is definitely added value if SIGMA rule conversion and YARA rule creation are provided from the platform.

Incentivized

• Tuning takes a very long time
• Turning the product on or off can take time
• When an action is prevented by CSP, there is no pop up or notification, making this a burden for server administrators

Incentivized

They respond quickly and efficiently without the need to reiterate the actual issue. Their backline support is amazing and always there for us when it is needed. They explain the troubleshooting steps taken and what they did to help us resolve the issue just incase it creeps up again we have the information to correct it ourselves.

Many of the products that can be used to be ingested into a security event management software can be cumbersome with threat streamThere are many opportunities to continue fine-tuning the environment and providing great context in regards to threat research. When compared to other products threat stream stands out from usability and features.

Incentivized

We evaluated Bit 9 and you have more flexibility with the rule set and do not rely on the cloud to tell you what is approved and not approved. You build out the policies the way you need them to be and who better knows the environment that the people that work it daily.

• After the Initial startup cost, it has overall had a positive impact by increasing efficiency of the team and freeing up analysts to do manual threat hunting

Incentivized

• Great protection for unchanging systems
• We have comfort that the protected systems are safe from intrusion
• Excellent price

Incentivized