PWI Announces Breakthrough Technology for Security Information Analysis, Threat and Vulnerability Management

Red Bank, NJ. - December 17, 2002 - PWI, Inc., today announced the commercial availability of the Adaptive Security Engine (ASE), a breakthrough security information analysis technology that improves security assurance, saves time and lowers costs. ASE automates the analysis and origination of actionable intelligence from the voluminous logs and reports generated by the array of security solutions deployed within the enterprise. ASE overcomes the limitations of policy, signature and rules-based approaches and represents a major advancement in anomaly detection that successfully addresses its two most commonly cited limitations: accuracy and adaptivity.

PWI is making ASE available to security technology companies looking to turbo charge their offerings in response to growing customer demand for smarter solutions that automate some of today's manual security administrative functions.

ASE automatically sifts through and analyzes the mountains of output produced by network and security products to instantaneously identify the most serious risks, misuse and vulnerabilities that threaten the enterprise. What used to be a time consuming, error prone and labor-intensive process assigned to system administrators is now fully automated and reduced to minutes. This frees up security staff to focus on more highly valued and important tasks such as responding sooner to the most serious breaches and initiating the appropriate defensive and preventative actions.

ASE generates more accurate results and reduces the number of false alerts by doing a better job of distinguishing between threatening and non-threatening security events. As it formulates more precise event categorizations, ASE is simultaneously adapting its perspective of normal and suspicious events as it takes into account the dynamic nature of the environment it is monitoring.

The keys to achieving these performance advantages are in the data and processing models that underpin the Adaptive Security Engine:

• Open and heterogeneous data model incorporates data from the wide array of currently available security technologies in unlimited combinations
   

• Fuzzy clustering allows for continual processing of large volumes of multivariate structures
   

• Kernel mode classifiers allow events to be automatically and precisely categorized
   

• Unsupervised learning technology draws from accumulated experiences, knowledge and changes in the environment to drive self-adaptiveness
   

• User interface fosters supervised learning derived from the know-how and 
  experiences of expert administrators

According to Konstantin Malkov, Ph.D. and PWI's Chief Technology Officer, "For several years, the potential benefit of applying these learning theories in real-world situations has been much discussed in academic circles." He continued, "PWI has made the theory a reality and by embedding it in this analytic engine we have created one of the first viable commercial implementations of unsupervised learning technology".

"The leading players are working hard to keep pace with rapidly evolving customer demands, filling the gaps in their offerings and further enhancing their existing product suites. However the policy, signature and rules-based nature of these technologies make them not only inherently limited in their ability to detect new types of threats, but complicated and cumbersome to maintain and support. ASE addresses these challenges," said Gregory J. Salvato, PWI's Chairman and CEO.

"We are very excited about this breakthrough," Salvato said. "Our goal is for ASE to be the driving force behind the next stage in the evolution of enterprise security technology," he concluded.

New products from PWI that leverage the Adaptive Security Engine will be available to enterprise clients beginning in December. For more information, please call 732-212-8110, visit www.pwicorp.com, or email info@pwicorp.com.

About PWI

Based in Red Bank, New Jersey, PWI (http://www.pwicorp.com) provides advanced technology products and solutions in IT Security, Enterprise Messaging, Analytics and Custom Software Development to support the core business and product management functions of organizations across a range of vertical and horizontal industry segments.