We know that fresh, accurate, and timely data is the key ingredient to any cybersecurity intel effort. Security teams can have all the tools and manpower in the world, but without access to the right data (the kind of data that also reduces false positives and minimizes noise) security efforts will ultimately fall short. As a security pro responsible for protecting the organization, you need to know that no risks have been overlooked, and that you’re focusing on the activity that actually poses a threat to your infrastructure. Unfortunately, not all data is created equal.
At Censys, our internet data is second to none. Third-party research shows we serve up data with the least noise and the most visibility — and we deliver it in a clean, user-friendly format. This highly-structured data also enables threat hunters to identify unique characteristics of attacker-controlled infrastructure and easily locate hosts given known indicators of compromise.
It was for reasons like these that a large cybersecurity company with 275.5M in funding chose Censys for its data needs.
Looking for the Right Data Product
The cybersecurity services firm was seeking a data product that could provide a “state of systems” check and monitor for risks. The firm had selected three potential vendors and ran a competitive process to help determine which vendor would best fulfill their requirements. As the firm’s CTO put it, the key variables that set Censys apart were: “speed of scanning, depth of scanning, and relative ease of ingesting the data.”
How else did Censys stack up against the enterprise competitors the cybersecurity services firm evaluated?
1. Accuracy
Enterprise Data Competitors: Competitors scan a limited part of the internet on a weekly or monthly basis.
Censys: Censys scans more of the internet daily to increase the freshness of data and reduce false positives.
2. Workflow
Enterprise Data Competitors: Competition provides data scanning results that need to be reconstructed to provide a current view of a host.
Censys: Data downloads in JSON format provide a full view of a host and associated services, leading to a lower engineering lift to ingest the data.
3. Visibility
Enterprise Data Competitors: While high traffic ports are sometimes scanned, the reduced number of ports scanned at 1500+ indicates that some services may not appear during the scan.
Censys: Censys continuously scans 101 protocols across the top 3500+ ports on the full IPv4 address space and the top 100+ ports daily to ensure we’re providing users with maximum visibility.
View the Case Study
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