Damballa unveiled Damballa Failsafe 5.1, a cyber threat solution for corporate networks. It includes features that reduce the workload of over-tasked incident response teams, while improving the time it takes to confirm and remediate a breach.


By monitoring network traffic for malicious behaviors and correlating all malicious activity, Damballa Failsafe identifies compromised assets. It combines the C&C detection and malware analysis capabilities to deliver:

Malware Execution Confirmation (Breach Confirmation)

Trace reports from the real-time analysis of “malware in motion,” where Damballa has detected suspicious files entering a corporate network, are automatically correlated with malicious network behavior detected on the targeted device.

When network behavior from a targeted device matches the information in the trace reports from the malware analysis, Damballa Failsafe provides notifications that positively confirm that the malware was successful in compromising the device. This confirmation is accomplished without requiring any endpoint agent software.

The patent-pending Malware Execution Confirmation capability or “Breach Confirmation” is critically important for incident responders as it completely eliminates false positives and noisy alerts. Other network-based malware analysis tools may detect and analyze inbound malware, but they cannot tell responders whether the malware successfully infected the targeted device.

Malware may not execute for many reasons (e.g. incompatible endpoint OS or endpoint AV/HIPS may stop the malware). If incident responders must treat each malware sighting as an alarm and chase down and investigate the targeted device, they waste valuable time and resources. Through Breach Confirmation, incident responders stop “chasing ghosts” and can focus their efforts on true infections that pose the most significant risk to the business, such as data loss or industrial espionage.

Retroactive Analysis (Instant Replay)

Security teams can now review up to 24 hours of history prior to the first indication of a compromise to gain a better understanding of the cause of the infection. Damballa Failsafe 5.1 buffers network activity to enable incident responders to hit the “Instant Replay” button when Damballa Failsafe convicts a device as being infected.

The network history available for the patent-pending Retroactive Analysis includes all files downloaded by the device in the 24 hours preceding the conviction. All files will be marked as ‘circumstantial’ and can then automatically undergo Dynamic Analysis.

Future releases of the Instant Replay feature will also buffer all interesting network behaviors including suspicious destinations, traffic type and traffic header information.

Advanced malware can easily evade network-based malware detection systems. The Instant Replay capability can be critical for helping security teams understand how an infection occurred and improving their security posture. This new feature gives information security teams a powerful way to identify the source and origin of the attack.