Catbird Security (www.catbird.com), provider of the industry’s only fully-hosted, enterprise-class, managed security platform and developer of the new V-Agent™ virtual agent, and open source innovator and SNORT® creator, Sourcefire, Inc. (Nasdaq: FIRE), today announced that Catbird V-Agent will be the industry’s first VMware Certified Appliance to incorporate the leading Snort technology and will be supported by Sourcefire’s official Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) Certified Snort Rules. For the first time, SNORT, the open source standard in intrusion prevention, will be available for protection of both physical and virtual infrastructures. As part of the Catbird V-Agent, this will be the industry’s first VMware Certified Appliance with IPS/IDS based on Sourcefire’s VRT rules.

Industry pundits have been warning of the new security risks virtualization poses to data centers. Last April, in a highly-quoted report, the Gartner Group cautioned that a rush to virtualization can weaken security. In August, Rachel Chalmers, a senior analyst with the 451 Group, a technology analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, reported that, “The most obvious peril hypervisors pose to virtualized network security is simply that they take that network traffic out of the range of conventional security devices. A packet sniffing appliance can't see packets that never leave a given physical server.” This comment appeared in an independent report, titled “Catbird protects hypervisor as malware fears set the cat among the pigeons,” which was published on August 27 of this year (see Editor’s Note below).

Catbird’s V-Agent, loaded with the Sourcefire VRT certified rules, is designed specifically to address this issue. As the 451 Group report continues, “The V-Agent solves that problem by residing within the virtualized network. It's a logical approach to the problem.”

Unlike traditional host-based solutions, stateful appliances and proprietary hardware solutions, Catbird’s unique “in-the-cloud” architecture is 100% plug-and-play for virtualized environments. As a stateless agent running as a guest on the virtual infrastructure, Catbird V-Agents are simpler and less costly to deploy and manage than traditional security solutions.

“VMware’s recent acquisition of Determina is an acknowledgment that there is a real security threat impeding the widespread adoption of virtualization,” observed Edmundo Costa, COO of Catbird. “That malware can move freely within VMware hosts and potentially contaminate all guest machines is a nightmare scenario that is unnerving to IT administrators, particularly as they have spent years securing their physical networks from that possibility.”

Snort has been downloaded more than 3 million times and has over 100,000 active users, and Sourcefire’s award-winning Vulnerability Research Team develops the official VRT Certified Snort Rules. With the integration of these VRT Certified Rules into the Catbird V-Agent, IT chiefs now have at their disposal the first comprehensive security solution for VMware ESX Server and Workstation that integrates IPS/IDS with other key security features, including vulnerability monitoring, policy enforcement and Network Access Control (NAC) for VMware hosts.

“As the de facto standard for Intrusion Prevention, Snort protects the majority of today’s leading physical networks and this agreement extends our reach into the next generation of virtual networks,” said Haig Colter, Director of Business Development at Sourcefire. “As more companies deploy virtual environments, we fully expect to see the same level of exploits and threats that we see on physical networks, and we are excited that the Catbird V-Agent will bring the same level of protection to virtual networks.”