Mandiant Launches Research Division

In an announcement timed to coincide with the Black Hat conference last week in Las Vegas, Mandiant, a provider of security threat detection and response solutions, said that it has formed a new research division dubbed “Mandiant Labs” (M-Labs™).

The Alexandria, Virginia-based company said its new research initiative combines its reverse engineers, malware analysts and researchers onto a single team in an effort to drive innovation and automation across the company to support Mandiant’s products and services.

“At Mandiant, we recognize that innovation is the key to staying one step ahead of the adversary,” said Travis Reese, Mandiant president and chief operating officer. “Mandiant has already revolutionized how organizations detect, respond to, and contain targeted attacks. M-Labs concentrate many of the industry’s top security experts in a single organization.”

M-Labs™ will be headed up by Jamie Butler, chief researcher and co-author of the book,”Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel,” and Greg Jones, Director of Mandiant Labs.

According to the company, the M-Labs team will focus its efforts in two specific areas:

Intelligence Gathering and Analysis – Works with Mandiant’s consulting organization to collect, triage and analyze intelligence gathered from Mandiant’s ongoing operations that track advanced attack groups, including new malware samples and other tools, techniques and protocols of advanced attack groups.

Advanced Analytics & Service Delivery Automation – The M-Labs team work to develop new and new and faster ways to process the intelligence collected from the more than one million endpoints it monitors for clients, along with the hundreds of thousands of hours its consultants spend investigating security intrusions.

“Time counts when responding to advanced attackers,” said Jamie Butler, Mandiant’s chief researcher and the leader of the M-Labs team. “The work of the M-Labs team will help our clients know where the attackers are, how they are behaving and help anticipate their next moves.”

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