Check Point To Buy Serverless Security Firm Protego To Protect Cloud

The acquisition of early-stage vendor Protego’s serverless security technology should help Check Point customers avoid having vulnerable code deployed into production.

Check Point Software Technologies plans to purchase early-stage security vendor Protego to prevent malicious attacks on serverless functions in run time.

The San Carlos, Calif.-based platform security vendor said the move to cloud-native applications bears many inherent vulnerabilities and potential misconfigurations that require extending security tools to protect functions and code. Check Point said its acquisition of Baltimore-based Protego’s serverless security technology should help prevent vulnerable code from being deployed into production.

“With the acquisition of Protego, we really fill in another gap,” said Frank Rauch, Check Point’s head of worldwide channel sales. “With the emphasis that AWS is putting on Lambda - and with Azure doing the same thing - we really enhance our position.”

[Related: Check Point Buys IoT Security Startup Cymplify To Safeguard Firmware]

Customers have embraced serverless environments to simplify their cloud ecosystem by having the cloud providers dynamically manage the allocation of machine resources on their behalf, Rauch said. The shift takes a lot of detailed work in the cloud away from customers, but provides partners with services opportunities around assessing, migrating, managing and distributing workloads, Rauch said.

The Protego technology will be a good fit for solution providers that have invested heavily in application development and migration since serverless technology has become a big part of how applications and workloads are run, Rauch said. Partners with large public cloud and managed cloud services practices will also benefit from Protego by becoming more consultative with customers about their application needs.

In addition to cloud-native solution providers, Rauch said many worldwide data center partners and pure-play security partners would be interested in Protego’s technology due to the strong relationships they’ve formed with the likes of Azure and AWS. Being able to provide this capability without having to turn to a very early-stage vendor is appealing to partners that wish to streamline operations, he said.

“Partners have bet a lot of their future on cloud,” Rauch told CRN. “Many of them are leading with public cloud solutions right now.”

Terms of the deal, which is expected to close this quarter, weren’t disclosed. Check Point’s stock is down $1.52 (1.29 percent) to $116.36 in late morning trading Monday.

Protego was founded in 2017, employs 18 people, and raised $2 million of outside funding in a May 2019 seed round led by led by Ron Gula of Gula Tech Adventures, Glilot Capital Partners, and the MetroSITE Group of security industry leaders, including former RSA CTO Tim Belcher, according to LinkedIn and Crunchbase.

The rapid adoption of serverless computing technologies such as AWS Lambda has challenged existing cloud and application security paradigms, according to Check Point. In response, the company said it will be first to market with an offering for cloud workload protection and security posture management, providing continuous serverless security with unmatched run time protection and application hardening.

Check Point said it plans to integrate Protego’s serverless security technology into its Infinity architecture in the first quarter of 2020. The Infinity platform supports networks, mobile, endpoint, IoT and cloud environments, according to Check Point.

Infusing Check Point CloudGuard with serverless security will provide CISOs with full visibility, control and complete security coverage of the entire serverless estate with just the click of a button, according to the company.

In addition, Protego’s technology integrates out of the box with a broad set of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) frameworks so that DevOps teams can ensure that only compliant functions are deployed to production. Customers have praised Protego’s technology for its innovative identity and access management (IAM) hardening capabilities and minimal performance impact.

The deal comes just six months after top Check Point competitor Palo Alto Networks purchased early-stage serverless security startup PureSec for $47 million. Adding Tel Aviv, Israel-based PureSec to the Palo Alto Networks Prisma cloud security suite put the company in a unique position to secure modern applications throughout their entire lifecycle, the company said at the time.

Meanwhile, for Check Point, this is the company’s fourth acquisition in the past 14 months. The company bought security startup Cymplify last month to defend IoT devices against highly-sophisticated attacks by hardening and protecting the devices’ firmware.

Check Point acquired emerging web application and API protection vendor ForceNock in January to bolster its advanced machine-learning protection capabilities. And in October 2018, Check Point purchased emerging vendor Dome9 for $175 million to help customers secure multi-cloud deployments across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

All told, Check Point has made 15 acquisitions over the course of its 26-year history, according to Crunchbase.

Study Finds Allergy Medicine To Help Treat Lung Cancer

(MENAFN- IANS) New York, Dec 7 (IANS) Researchers have identified an allergy pathway that, when blocked, unleashes anti-tumour immunity in mouse models of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

And in an early parallel study in humans, combining immunotherapy with dupilumab -- an Interleukin-4 (IL-4) receptor-blocking antibody widely used for treating allergies and asthma -- boosted patients' immune systems.

The study, published in the journal Nature, showed one out of the six people experienced significant tumour reduction.

"Immunotherapy using checkpoint blockade has revolutionised treatment for non-small cell lung cancer, the most common form of lung cancer, but currently only about a third of patients respond to it alone, and in most patients, the benefit is temporary," said Miriam Merad, from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The team focussed on using single cell technology and artificial intelligence to identify molecular immune programmes that can dampen tumour immune response to checkpoint blockade.

Also known as a PD1 inhibitor, checkpoint blockade is a type of cancer immunotherapy that can unleash the cancer-killing activity of T cells.

"Using single cell technologies, we discovered that the immune cells infiltrating lung cancers, as well as other cancers we studied, exhibited characteristics of a 'type 2' immune response, which is commonly associated with allergic conditions like eczema and asthma," said Nelson LaMarche, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

"These results led us to explore whether we could repurpose a medication typically used for allergic conditions to 'rescue' or enhance tumour response to checkpoint blockade," said Thomas Marron, Director of the Early Phase Trial Unit at Mount Sinai's Tisch Cancer Center.

"Strikingly, we found that IL-4 blockade enhanced lung cancer response to checkpoint blockade in mice and in six lung cancer patients with treatment-resistant disease. In fact, one patient whose lung cancer was growing despite checkpoint blockade had nearly all their cancer disappear after receiving just three doses of the allergy medication, and his cancer remains controlled today, over 17 months later."

The researchers are encouraged by the initial results but emphasise the need for larger clinical trials to validate the drug's efficacy in treating NSCLC. Beyond the clinical trial findings, the investigators have now expanded the clinical trial, adding dupilumab to checkpoint blockade for a larger group of lung cancer patients. Through the trials, they aim to search for biomarkers that can predict which cancer patients might benefit from dupilumab treatment and which may not.

--IANS

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$22M to help fund two-story TSA checkpoint for Kahului

A rendering shows what the future two-story TSA checkpoint will look like at the south side of the Kahului Airport. The state announced Friday that it will receive a $22 million federal grant to help build the checkpoint, which will include screening lanes on the top floor and retail on the ground floor. Work is expected to start in 2024 and finish in 2025. — Rendering courtesy Department of Transportation

A $22 million federal grant will help build a new TSA checkpoint at the Kahului Airport that could add as many as six security screening lanes to the second-busiest airport in the state.

The Federal Aviation Administration is providing the grant to the state Department of Transportation, which plans to build the new two-story security screening checkpoint at the south end of the ticket lobby.

The north checkpoint and all its lanes will remain operational, and as part of the multimillion-dollar project, that checkpoint will be upgraded by enclosing it and adding air conditioning, the Department of Transportation said Friday.

Maui District Airports Manager Marvin Moniz said the federal funding is “good news, well justified with the number of passengers traveling through Kahului Airport.”

“It kind of takes that whole lineup of passengers that currently congest one main checkpoint and now we’re able to balance it all,” Moniz said via phone Friday afternoon. “So yeah, we’re excited about that. I think it’s a win for the passengers, and I think it’s a win for the airlines, and obviously for the airport as well.”

A line of travelers winds through the TSA checkpoint at Kahului Airport in November. State officials plan to enclose the checkpoint and install air conditioning, as well as construct a new, two-story screening checkpoint at the other end of the ticket lobby in hopes of reducing wait times and making conditions more comfortable for travelers at the state’s second-busiest airport. — The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo

He said that passengers will be able to go through the north or south checkpoint depending on their airline and terminal — both sides are a mix of interisland and Mainland flights, with airlines like Hawaiian, American and Delta on the north side and Southwest, Alaska and sometimes United and American on the south side.

The new south checkpoint waiting lobby, screening lanes and TSA support spaces will be located on the second floor of the security screening facility. Other airport support spaces and tenant retail opportunities will be on the ground floor.

A pedestrian bridge will connect the new south checkpoint to a passenger hold room and will span over an existing service road.

The project will cost $62.3 million, with work expected to begin in the summer of 2024 and be completed by the end of 2025, according to the DOT. Per the state budget, the improvements are being paid for by bond funds, which the state already has, a DOT spokesperson said Friday.

Moniz said the timeline will depend on getting contractors, but the design for the new checkpoint is already done, and with the federal funding, “we’ll be able to expedite putting out the bid and starting construction.”

“That’s definitely good news,” he said. “Hats off to our Hawaii congressional delegation because they supported us all the way and they definitely seen the need.”

A bustling hub of both residents traveling interisland or to the Mainland and visitors coming for vacation, Kahului gets about 10,000 to 11,000 arriving passengers and a similar amount departing every day, Moniz estimated. During peak travel times like holidays, this can swell to about 13,000 passengers coming in and a similar number heading out.

In 2022, the state’s busiest airport, Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, saw 9,158,477 inbound passengers and 9,187,567 outbound passengers, not including those passing through on connecting flights, according to the DOT. Kahului, the state’s second-busiest hub, had 4,246,246 inbound passengers and 4,223,491 outbound passengers.

Last year, airport officials tried a mix of solutions for the jampacked lines that overflowed from the covered TSA facilities to the hot sidewalk. They installed X-ray equipment that can scan bags without removing electronics, used machines to scan photo IDs instead of boarding passes, deployed canine units to sniff out bags while travelers were still in line and set aside an additional lane for TSA Pre-Check travelers. Large tents were also put up to protect waiting passengers from the sun.

Moniz said the measures have helped expedite screening and reduce wait times for passengers.

“It’s moving along for the most part. We haven’t had any major or lengthy delays this summer so far because of line congestion or lack of gates,” he said.

Construction on the new south checkpoint isn’t expected to interrupt operations. It will be located just past the airline check-in counters, and Moniz said any work that will require taking away airline working space will be done after hours in the 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. slot. Some of the work will require reducing traffic in the back of the airport where airlines take baggage carts, “but it won’t bring them to a stop,” he said.

TSA officials were supportive of the new checkpoint, saying it will benefit both travelers and workers.

“We are grateful for the investment our federal and state partners are making in TSA security screening operations at Kahului Airport,” Nanea Vasta, TSA federal security director for Hawai’i and the Pacific, said in a news release. “Travelers will notice the improvements when departing the airport and TSA employees will ultimately enjoy a more comfortable environment when working in the new space.”

* Managing Editor Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.

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