At RSA Conference 2007 in San Francisco, CA today announced CA Host-Based Intrusion Prevention System, a new solution that combines advanced firewall, intrusion detection and intrusion prevention capabilities to defend enterprise computing assets against today's blended threats.

By providing centrally managed proactive threat protection for PCs and servers, CA HIPS enables IT organizations to quickly and efficiently implement best-practices security policies for system endpoints across the enterprise.

CA HIPS monitors both incoming and outgoing traffic and enables centralized management of access control policies. It also simplifies the deployment and management of intrusion prevention on Windows systems across the enterprise.

"Today's sophisticated threats require a multi-faceted defense that incorporates proactive threat detection and whitelisting, working hand-in-hand with existing antivirus and anti-spyware technologies," said Robin Bloor, partner, Hurwitz and Associates. "With CA HIPS, CA is taking sophisticated defense to a new level and enabling system administrators to create granular security policies tailored for their specific organization."

"Learn-by-Example" Administration

CA HIPS uniquely facilitates the definition and implementation of security policies by allowing administrators to create policies based on user behavior and existing examples. This "learn-by-example" approach eliminates much of the time and effort typically required for administrators to define policies for specific roles, applications and/or resources. Administrators can use this feature to set policies for users and groups defined within LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory, for types of systems (such as laptops, servers and devices), for specific security mechanisms (such as firewall, IDS and IPS), and for specific types of applications.

CA HIPS also makes it easy for administrators to define these policies with any desired level of granularity. For example, the use of USB storage devices can be limited to specific users, applications, and/or hours-depending on the particular business requirements of the organization.

"IT organizations are already dealing with twice as many threats as they did even just a year ago-and those threats are getting more complex and sophisticated all the time," said Sam Curry, vice president, CA security management. "By providing another powerful yet easy-to-administer layer of defense to existing enterprise security architectures, CA HIPS is helping customers further minimize their exposure to IT-related risks without putting undue strain on their budgets" - CA.