The GSN 2015 Digital Yearbook of Awards

purchases, Fumai said. And the government was hit hard
too, as the Office for Personnel Management reported
that attacks made the records for millions of federal
workers and contractors vulnerable.
“It’ll take a generation before we find out what the
effects of OPM will be,” said Fumai, who has worked for
more than 25 years in the communications and technology
industries.
And the attacks will only become more sophisticated
in the future, according to industry experts, as the hackers
find ways to infiltrate without leaving a trace or
signature behind.
“Past infections always deposited a small binary
somewhere on disk, but the newest evasion techniques
used by fileless malware—Kovter,
Powelike, and XswKit, for
example—leave no trace on
disk, thus making detection,
which generally relies on
static files on disk, more difficult,”
McAfee Labs wrote in its
threats report last November.
This is where AppGuard
becomes very useful, Fumai
said. There is no need to
try and detect malware that
might not have any signature or binary present because
AppGuard prevents the first stage attack so malware
will never get its foothold in the enterprise. That ability
makes the solution very attractive to Blue Ridge’s
partners and clients.
“AppGuard is American Cyber’s ONLY solution for
zero-day malware prevention, as well as the easiest and
most cost-effective malware protection available,” said
Gary Winkler, president of American Cyber and a former
program executive officer with the U.S. Army. “It simply
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prevents any malware from executing, without needing
to know what the malware is, and then AppGuard
reports the details of the attempt. AppGuard has absolutely
no impact to system/application performance or
user experience. It should be part of the Army’s Gold
Master configuration for every end-point.”
AOL serves as another partner for Blue Ridge. The
multimedia company offers its subscribers, which were
more than 2 million last year, AOL Tech Fortress. The
service uses AppGuard to block viruses and other suspicious
files from harming a
user’s computer.
AppGuard does not just
prevent attacks, Fumai said.
Its proactive defense keeps
clients from having to spend
millions – or more – of dollars
to assess the impact of a
breech, to make repairs and to cover liabilities from
the attack. That means corporate clients can invest
more in research and development and public
sector agencies can be better stewards of taxpayer
funds.
And Blue Ridge is working on new ways to protect
its clients. Fumai noted the company is working
an “Internet of Things” guard that would secure
various cloud networks, including those run by Amazon
and Microsoft. This would allow any networked device
to be protected from attack.
“IoT Guard will be able to secure whatever clouds
they’re working at the same time with multiple devices,”
Fumai said. “This will not break the IT or compliance
standards already established. We don’t break things.
We’re just an overlay.”