ESET Debuts Its First Commercially Available Threat Intelligence Services

An executive from the cybersecurity vendor tells CRN the services should offer numerous benefits to MSPs and other channel partners, including opportunities to ‘position themselves as thought leaders back to their clients.’

Cybersecurity firm ESET is launching its first threat intelligence services that are commercially available to all customers, which the company says will help create numerous opportunities for partners to better serve their end customers.

ESET has previously offered threat intelligence feeds to certain customers, but is now commercializing its threat intelligence services for the first time to customers and partners, such as managed services providers (MSPs), ESET executives told CRN.

[Related: Mandiant: 79 Percent Of Cybersecurity Decisions Ignore Threat Intelligence]

While the threat intelligence services market is already crowded with offerings, “we have some history in that whole arena,” said Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at ESET.

ESET aims to stand out with its more than three decades of generating high-quality security research, he said. Since its founding in 1992, that has included presentations by ESET researchers at conferences including CyberWarCon, Defcon and Black Hat, Anscombe said.

ESET “was founded by researchers, and we’re run by researchers. The core of the company has remained a research company,” he said.

The new ESET threat intelligence services include ESET Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Reports, which include access to an ESET analyst, and ESET Threat Intelligence Feeds, which aims to provide a global view of the threat landscape in real time, with data feeds including malicious files, IPs and domains, as well as botnets and APT information.

For MSPs and other partners, the advantage is “really about improving the value prop back to their end customers and ensuring that they stay relevant with their end customers,” said Ryan Grant, vice president of sales at ESET North America.

For instance, with the ESET threat intelligence services, “they can really position themselves as thought leaders back to their clients,” Grant said.

MSPs can also build a service around the threat intelligence offering, he said.

“You see a lot of MSPs do either monthly or quarterly reviews with their clients. When you start to incorporate intelligence reporting into that, there’s a lot they can do from a commercial standpoint. And we’re here to support that,” Grant said.

Ron Brown, co-founder and CTO of White Rock Cybersecurity, an ESET partner based in Dallas, said he foresees a major opportunity to bring the vendor’s threat intelligence services to customers, particularly those that are already using ESET cybersecurity tools such as its endpoint security solution.

“I always feel that they haven’t really marketed some of the stuff they can do. They’re finally starting to get out there and really show some of the power they have,” Brown said. “They have you know a worldwide presence, so they have high exposure to pretty much everything that happens all across the globe.”

As White Rock talks to customers throughout the year, potentially at renewal time, the solution provider expects to be bringing up the ESET threat intelligence service as an offering they can add on, he said.

“I believe it’ll gain interest with companies that are already using the [ESET] product, because they’ll be like, ‘We use the product. We’re happy with the product. Let’s take one more step and start using it for proactive network defense,’” Brown said.

Ultimately, in today’s threat environment, “you’ve got so many pathways where people are exposed to risk that you really have to have something to get your arms around [the threat] — and at least have a plan and proactively try to protect your users.”