Merit Network has signed an agreement today with QuadMetrics to provide the company's suite of security and risk assessment tools to Merit Members, as well as research and educational institutions throughout the country. The new services help organizations take a proactive approach to managing cybersecurity risks on the basis of large scale data measurements and analysis. 

"I'm really excited about QuadMetrics," said Don Welch, president and CEO of Merit. "Its foundation is research done at Merit, and it uses "big data analytics" to understand and better manage cybersecurity risk. I wish I'd had this tool when I was a CIO and CTO." 

QuadMetrics has been deployed to Merit's 11 Governing Members, including the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University. The new service continues Merit's innovative cybersecurity offerings for Members, which include the Michigan Cyber Range and Merit Secure Sandbox. 

"Quadmetrics is more than just another scanning tool," said Joe Adams, vice president for research and cyber security at Merit. "It looks at an organization from the outside and assesses how secure it is." 

Members can actively monitor, measure and mitigate their enterprise networks and workstations for cybersecurity risks. With QuadMetrics' Signet Scope, IT staff have a dashboard that reports active threats, malicious activity, network routing instability, and the organization's security posture. The system continually examines an organization's network environment for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, misuse and potential conflicts, and then provides reports and data that can be used to improve security measures and capabilities. 

For administrators who manage a large network, it's difficult to know all of the activities that are going on within the network. QuadMetrics makes it easier to measure and monitor cybersecurity risks. No internal instrumentation is necessary; continuous monitoring examines the network environment from an external perspective. 

QuadMetrics helps Members mitigate cybersecurity issues by identifying vulnerable services or rogue systems. Signet Scope provides weekly reports on active services running on the organization's network that are public and could possibly be exploited by a cyber attack, such as FTP, NTP, printers, and more. It also identifies malicious activity that has been observed to originate from the organization's network and active threats that are being launched from the network. Using QuadMetrics' data, Members can target infected workstations or servers, and lock down printers or other systems from misuse.

Manish Karir, formerly a network researcher for Merit, founded QuadMetrics with Mingyan Liu, following a Department of Homeland Security project that explored the use of network data analytics to determine the global reputation of organizations. Karir led many large-scale Internet measurement projects while at Merit, and he is using his years of experience to keep QuadMetrics at the forefront of cybersecurity risk management and assessment. Mingyan Liu is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. 

"We are excited by the opportunity to work with Merit to bring our products and services to research and educational organizations throughout the country," said Manish Karir, chief technical officer for QuadMetrics. "It is important for organizations to be proactive about their cybersecurity posture. They need to be able to measure it, understand it, and build well thought-out policies that take into consideration both their business needs and their risk profile. QuadMetrics' solutions allow organizations to quickly gauge their own cybersecurity posture as well as the risk introduced by their vendors and partners."