My uncle ran an advertising agency a long time ago, but I still remember one of his impactful ads. It was a picture of a car completely totaled after an accident. The car was damaged beyond repair, and it was obvious that the extent of the damage would have risked the lives of the passengers. The title read “But it got 35 miles per gallon.”
The efficiency of an automobile mattered then, and matters today. But it may not actually be the most important criteria if it cannot keep you safe on the road. Obviously there is a balance, as no one wants to purchase the “super safe” car that gets 2 miles per gallon. Ultimately, however, if the efficiency is “close enough”, I care a lot more about safety than I do about, say, an extra two miles per gallon.
Software solutions are similar. There are many ways to evaluate the quality of a solution, and both speed of execution (“How quickly does it perform its actions”) and efficacy (“How effective is it at its purported function”) are clearly two of them. Similar to the automobile analogy, assuming that execution speed is “close enough,” efficacy ends up being dramatically more important than an extra few milliseconds.
Which is why HYAS focused on having AV-TEST in Germany test the efficacy of our Protective DNS (pDNS) solution, HYAS Protect. We know that the execution speed is reasonable, so what really matters is “how effective is it at its purported function” – that is, will it detect anomalies and beaconing behavior, will it be effective at seeing the digital exhaust from a breach trying to communicate with its command-and-control, and how good is it at doing that.
Their conclusion? HYAS Protect is the most effective pDNS solution on the planet today – you can read the HYAS AV-TEST report on their website and even compare it yourself to Cisco Umbrella and other vendors.
Why does this matter? The speed of a pDNS solution is largely irrelevant if it isn’t providing good detection, which is why AV-TEST focuses on efficacy and not performance testing. Attackers continue to evolve and create new techniques to evade detection and penetrate the enterprise; they can mask their techniques but the higher the measured efficacy level, the more confidence you will have that any attack which breaches the enterprise can be detected and shut-down before it causes financial, reputational, or other damage.
HYAS achieves these results because we look at the problem, and overall cyber security space, in a different way. The foundation of HYAS is the realization that attacks today, whether malware-based or malware-less, require communication with command-and-control for instructions, advancement of the attack post-breach, and data exfiltration; HYAS therefore focused on being the expert in adversary infrastructure. The HYAS Adversary Infrastructure Platform encapsulates this intelligence; by continually gathering unique bespoke data across a combination of exclusive, private, and commercial/open-source data sets, and automatically organizing it in a constantly updating graph database, the HYAS adversary infrastructure platform captures the ever-changing landscape or what is, and isn’t, adversary infrastructure.
With each passing day, the set of data grows, the intelligence expands, and the unique knowledge encapsulated in the HYAS adversary infrastructure platform increases. The HYAS pDNS solution, HYAS Protect, utilizes the unique intelligence in this platform, combines it with our knowledge of DNS, to deliver the best-in-class results.
While it might be fun to drive, I don’t want to buy a car that may be fast but isn’t going to keep me safe if and when someone hits me. With attacks increasing every single day, why would anyone deploying a pDNS solution first and foremost not want the highest level of efficacy and confidence?
