Protecting Life-Saving IP: Novavax Strengthens Security with Threat Intelligence-Driven Security
Leading-edge insights paired with meaningful alerts and powerful integrations help the vaccine developer protect IP.
Saving lives is all in a day’s work for vaccine developer Novavax. And with lives on the line, it makes protecting intellectual property all the more valuable.
The intellectual property that comes from the biopharmaceutical company's heavy investments into research and development is one of the company’s top assets—and therefore vital to protect. That’s why the commitment to staying ahead must apply throughout the company, including security. “At Novavax, we are most concerned about anything that would cause issues to our intellectual property,” said Novavax's strategic threat intelligence analyst Nathalie Salisbury. “That’s what makes Novavax, Novavax.”
Being Proactive in a Fast-Changing Landscape
Keeping up-to-date with emerging vulnerabilities is a tall order, though. “The threats are changing very quickly,” Salisbury explained.
The Novavax security team needed to become more proactive in investigating and addressing threats, but that was difficult with their previous intelligence provider. Keyword-based alerting led to a flood of alerts, and the information in alerts had often already expired. After too many false positives and without a way to prioritize, alert fatigue soon set in.
Novavax turned to Recorded Future for a threat intelligence-driven solution.
“Threat intelligence-driven security is vital. It’s the eyes and ears of a security team. You can’t protect yourself against what you don’t know—threat intelligence gives you that.” — Nathalie Salisbury, Strategic Threat Intelligence Analyst, Novavax
Recorded Future’s Threat Intelligence gave Novavax the timely, immediately actionable insights Salisbury needed. “Threat Intelligence allows us to see the unknown and stay proactive to emerging vulnerabilities,” she said. “We’re able to predict things easier with threat intelligence that our other security tools just don’t have insight into.”
The Novavax team combined Recorded Future Threat Intelligence with the Splunk integration. This action consolidated their daily alerts, which "are much more useful now," Salisbury added. Salisbury estimates they received thousands of alerts with their previous vendor, but by correlating SIEM logs with Recorded Future, the team only receives about 10 per day—a much more manageable amount. When they are alerted to a threat, taking action is easier than ever before thanks to Recorded Future's Intelligence Cards, which provide essential information related to a specific investigation topic for triage and investigation.
Our other security tools defend us against things we know about already. Recorded Future is giving us insight into the unknown.
Nathalie Salisbury
Strategic Threat Intelligence Analyst, Novavax
Feature Spotlight: Overcoming Alert Fatigue
Advanced Query Builder's highly-customized search capabilities enable teams to create Custom Alerts and identify threats that are most relevant to them. To further reduce alert volume, security teams can leverage Risk Lists curated lists that contain details associated with malicious activity—and correlate those with SIEM logs to highlight only the most critical alerts and filter out false positives. With full context on Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) directly in Splunk through the Recorded Future integration, the team can simplify the research and investigation process.
Proactive Vigilance: Staying Ahead of Vendor Security Risks
The team at Novavax uses Third-Party Intelligence to continuously monitor for threats across their vendors and suppliers. This includes breaches, ransomware extortion, malicious communication with threat actors, and the dark web, helping Novavax to take appropriate actions to mitigate risk if such issues occur. Through this continuous monitoring, Salisbury noted that vendors don’t always reach out immediately after the first incident of an issue. Often, the vendor will wait until completing their own investigation and having all the answers in place before alerting their customers. In the meantime, the organization may be left completely in the dark.
“The security at Novavax has changed drastically since implementing Recorded Future,” Salisbury said. “We sharpened a lot of processes by introducing Third-Party Intelligence into our risk assessments, so we can make informed decisions about the vendors we do business with.”
Third-Party Intelligence closes that door by alerting Novavax to the issue even before the vendor does.
“A couple times now, Recorded Future has alerted us to something prior to the third-party vendor. That’s huge when we’re trying to protect our data.” —Nathalie Salisbury, Strategic Threat Intelligence Analyst, Novavax
She elaborated further: “It gives us an opportunity to launch an investigation to see what the vendor has access to, what we need to be concerned about, and how we can better protect ourselves.”
Feature Spotlight: Prioritizing Threats
With threats around every corner, it’s tough to know where to prioritize. Novavax uses Recorded Future’s Threat Map and performs weekly threat hunts to learn where they should first put their security efforts. “These are the real risks for our organization and need to be our priority,” says Salisbury.
Showcasing ROI That Gets Leadership Buy-in
While information security diligence comes with a cost, Salisbury said Recorded Future has proved its value at Novavax. Having such a comprehensive platform has allowed the company to eliminate two other security vendors, and reduce spend on a third.
“We consolidated a few of our vendors into Recorded Future and didn’t lose out on anything.” —Nathalie Salisbury, Strategic Threat Intelligence Analyst, Novavax
“If anything, we have a more seamless panel and get all our alerts on one platform,” she continued, noting how this allows the team to be more efficient.
Moreover, the team's weekly threat hunting program gets wide visibility, proving value to stakeholders across the company. “People are very curious about what is targeting our organization,” said Salisbury. The Splunk integration, in particular, helps kick off threat hunts faster and allows the team to pivot more easily when alerted of threats.
Recorded Future’s reporting further showcases how important the platform has become for the company. Novavax leadership learns about recent alerts, the risks they posed, and how Recorded Future enabled the security team to protect the company. And with compliance always top of mind, it's vital that Recorded Future helps Novavax meet some of their compliance controls.
In the race to develop vaccines that save lives, protecting intellectual property isn't just about security—it's about preserving hope for patients worldwide. With Recorded Future, Novavax has found a partner that understands these stakes.
The views expressed in this content are solely those of the individual and do not reflect the views or positions of their employer.
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