Viasat, a global communications company, announced today it is part of an elite community of commercial service providers approved to receive cyber threat intelligence through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Enhanced Cybersecurity Services (ECS) program. As an accredited ECS provider, Viasat will receive DHS-provided sensitive and classified cybersecurity threat indicators and information to defend U.S.-based public and private computer networks, including state and local governments, against unauthorized access, exploitation and data exfiltration.

DHS accredited Viasat as one of four companies able to pass stringent ECS program requirements following an audit of Viasat’s cybersecurity capabilities, security architecture and facilities. All DHS ECS service providers must achieve a high standard of security competence and compliance, including maintaining the ability to safeguard sensitive and classified information, and security approvals for personnel, facilities and computer network systems.

Ken Peterman, president, Government Systems, Viasat commented, “The added DHS ECS intelligence coupled with the advanced capabilities inherent in the Viasat cyber offering, enables us to better fortify our customers’ cyber posture and maintain a vigilant and watchful defense against the world’s most advanced adversaries. This added insight allows us to create a more accurate, customized, real-time cybersecurity picture that will enable customers to reach advanced cyber resiliency levels needed to reduce overall risks against cyber threats.”

How Viasat’s ECS solution works
Viasat’s ECS solution is unique in that it uses Viasat’s National Security Agency (NSA)-certified Trusted Cyber Sensor (TCS) to monitor network traffic with government provided classified indicators without routing traffic through its data center. Viasat strategically places its TCS devices within a customer’s network and securely manages, maintains and configures them remotely from Viasat’s Cyber Security Operations Center (CSOC). Once in the customer’s network, the TCS devices inspect network traffic on-premises, inside the customer perimeter boundary, ensuring customer privacy is preserved.

Viasat’s ECS solution is the first to take advantage of the ECS Netflow Analysis capability, which provides network traffic flow indicators to help customers detect malicious activity within their network, in addition to the traditional email and domain name indicators. These indicators can be sent by DHS up to six months in advance of them appearing on other premium, commercially-available threat intelligence feeds——which means customers may detect serious threats before their current technology stack of security tools detects them. If the Viasat CSOC uncovers a security incident, the customer is immediately notified, sent actionable information to quickly triage and remediate the situation and is made aware of additional support resources to help them respond. In fact, Viasat offers a full range of Managed Detection and Partnered Response (MDPR) services integrated with, and complementary to, the ECS program.

Insights about Viasat’s threat detection service
Viasat has a world-class CSOC that uses an integrated and scalable cybersecurity model based on the MITRE ATT&CK^® framework. Today, the Company analyzes 75,000 – 100,000 new indicators of compromise per day; 600,000 netflows of traffic data/minute and 27 terabytes of event data daily from commercial, enterprise, government and Department of Defense customers. Viasat processes this rich, diverse and large data set using proprietary analytics to create custom operationalized, contextualized and actionable intelligence for its premium level cybersecurity service.