FireEye Enhances OS, Expands Email Threat Protection Capabilities

FireEye, a provider of solutions that help companies block advanced cyber attacks, announced a major update to its FireEye OS that the company says enhances the management and functionality of several of its products.

The announcement of the upgraded OS comes just weeks after the company surprised the security industry with its roughly $1 billion acquisition of Mandiant. 

The new version, FireEye OS 7.1, brings improved management capabilities to its CM series, IPv6 network security support to its NX series, and enhanced email threat analysis capabilities to the EX series.

With FireEye OS 7.1, organizations can scale central management to deployments of hundreds of FireEye appliances and automate enterprise-wide alert notifications and responses using new Web services APIs, the company said.

Other new security enhancements include security analysis of IPv6 network traffic within the NX series and enhanced email analysis of files delivered through HTTP in the EX series.

The latest version of the FireEye OS also adds dynamic scanning of URLs sent via email, allowing the platform to analyze if they link to malicious files. FireEye EX now analyzes emails not only for malicious attachments, but also performs email header analysis and analyzes the URLs linking to suspicious files.

In addition, release 7.1 updates the local management within the NX, EX, and CM series with new role-based access controls, audit logging, complex passwords, and improved appliance health monitoring (SNMP).

The FireEye NX series is able protect networks ranging from 10 Mbps to 4 Gbps, and with FireEye OS 7.1 comes with a new enterprise dashboard, FireEye said.

Other features include “bypass control” congestion management enhancements that help ensure every attachment in every email gets analyzed by the MVX engine regardless of volume. 

“With the latest version of FireEye OS we’ve added more capabilities to our threat protection platform to augment email security and simplified the management of virtual machine threat protection, making it easier to scale their FireEye deployment and take back the advantages of technology and scale from cybercriminals,” said Manish Gupta, senior vice president of products at FireEye.

FireEye OS 7.1 is scheduled to be available by the end of February 2014.