MetaDefender Kiosk Customer Snapshot

Military Aerospace Manufacturing

This case study features an undisclosed manufacturing company founded in the 1980’s that produces military-grade aerospace products. They pride themselves on pioneering advances in aerospace technologies and consider intellectual property their most valuable asset. This manufacturer has tens of thousands of employees and works with thousands of vendors across three continents, who supply both hardware and software components that are used in their aerospace products.

Customer Challenges

Security is a major concern for any company that has a large number of employees and works with many vendors. One specific challenge the company faced was making sure that all software components received from vendors had been checked for threats before being verified as safe to install in their equipment.

The manufacturer’s strategy for checking for the presence of malware in vendor software was to use multiple virtual machines (VMs), each with a different antivirus engine installed. Not only was this process slow and costly, but they had to have someone maintain each antivirus license and install updates while making sure the VMs themselves were not infected.

OPSWAT’s Solution

The manufacturer was looking for a commercial solution that would allow them to scan vendor software for threats. By choosing OPSWAT’s MetaDefender Kiosk, they are able to check portable media devices such as USB drives for malware. MetaDefender is powered by Metascan (now MetaDefender), a multi-scanning solution that combines multiple antivirus engines into one easy to manage solution—this technology brought simplicity to the company’s anti-malware scanning process. All employees have to do to check software is insert it into a MetaDefender scanning station and let Metascan run an analysis for threats. Each MetaDefender station used by the manufacturer is completely offline, which adds another layer of security by disconnecting the scan from the internal network. OPSWAT provides new malware signatures from the antivirus engines as easy downloads with the updates from all included antivirus engines bundled together; these can then be easily applied to scanning stations by onsite personnel. Instead of using multiple VMs running different antivirus engines, they can now harness multiple engines from a single MetaDefender kiosk. The manufacturer set up a proof of concept, and after deciding to purchase the solution, they only had to apply a purchased license key to move to live deployment.

Adopting MetaDefender has enabled the company to increase overall detection rates, improve logging and has helped them deliver a better and safer final product.

Results

By using MetaDefender, the manufacturer has improved the security of their finished products and reduced the operating costs and time associated with using and maintaining multiple VMs. OPSWAT provides all licensing, support, and updates needed to all antivirus engines included in Metascan, so the manufacturer can focus on what they do best, producing highly-advanced machinery and software. They can now rest easy knowing each software component is scanned with multiple antivirus engines and that every file is analyzed for potential threats.

Along with easily checking files for threats, MetaDefender has reduced the time needed to train employees as the user interface of the kiosk is very intuitive. File scan times have also been dramatically reduced now that all scanning happens concurrently instead of through multiple VMs. Adopting MetaDefender has enabled the company to increase overall detection rates, improve logging and has helped them deliver a better and safer final product.

For more information about MetaDefender, please visit the product page. To evaluate MetaDefender, please sign up for an account on the OPSWAT Portal.