Brad Pearpoint (Advantage)
Managed services and security provider Advantage is now a partner of Malware Free Networks (MFN), the intelligence community's cyber threat feed.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of the intelligence community led by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), developed MFN as a service designed to strengthen New Zealand’s cyber defense capabilities.
The threat detection and disruption service provides near real-time threat intelligence reflecting current malicious activity targeting New Zealand organisations. It launched after a trial period in December 2021 with nine foundation partners.
MFN works with Advantage and other local partners to deliver technology platforms that can take cyber threat information and very quickly turn it into actionable threat intelligence for partners to deploy.
Advantage offers the MFN service as part of its managed security products such as firewalls, managed detection and response, security information and event management (SIEM), secure web gateways and endpoint protection.
“We are pleased to work with the NCSC in order to bring the MFN disruption service into our intelligence and service portfolio," said managing director of Advantage Brad Pearpoint.
"Threat intelligence is critical for us to assess risk and protect our managed customers and therefore we are always looking for ways to bolster insights in this area which lead us to this partnership.”
With managed firewall protection and endpoint protection, the benefits of the partnership were immediate for current clients because the service provider could see in real time connections to known bad IPs and domains and take action, Advantage said.
On launch of the MFN programme, GCSB director-general Andrew Hampton said the key to scaling the benefits from NCSC cyber defence capabilities was to work in partnership with other cyber security providers.
“The Malware Free Networks capability makes that possible, providing a platform for us to share indicators of malicious activity with security service providers so they can detect and disrupt that activity on their customers’ networks," Hampton said.
New Zealand's advanced research network REEANZ is also a member of the programme.
Lisa Fong, director of the NCSC told Reseller News there had been strong interest in MFN since launch.
"We have formed new partnership agreements with a number of additional providers, and are currently working with them to bring their MFN services online," she said. "This process can take several months depending on how the partner organisation configures their service delivery. We will announce new partners when they go live with their MFN service."
Earlier this month, another collaboration between the GCSB and two major cloud service providers was judged the best security project in the annual information security industry iSANZ awards.
The GCSB worked with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to have its government information security standards (NZISM) built into product templates for the deployment of cloud products.
