Horizon3.ai NodeZero Platform

The primary use case that we have for The NodeZero Platform  is for scanning the environment and identifying vulnerabilities. The tool prioritizes vulnerabilities, focusing on the most critical ones.

It has evolved significantly over time. What sets this tool apart from others is its ability to prioritize vulnerabilities effectively. Many vulnerability management (VM) tools today provide users with extensive lists of vulnerabilities—often numbering in the thousands, with categories like four thousand critical and three thousand high. Upon deeper examination, it's common to find that more than half of those vulnerabilities aren't even exploitable. This results in overwhelming amounts of data without a clear focus on what needs immediate attention to improve security. In contrast, this tool excels at prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their relevance to attack scenarios. It analyzes specific attack chains to determine how critical each vulnerability is and assesses how frequently those vulnerabilities appear across various attack chains. By doing this, this tool can elevate the priority of certain vulnerabilities, allowing organizations to concentrate their remediation efforts on the most critical issues. A prime example of this effectiveness comes from an acquisition we conducted. The organization believed it had a robust security environment. However, after running The NodeZero Platform  over a weekend, we discovered vulnerabilities that allowed for compromise in approximately 35 different ways. With other tools, addressing these vulnerabilities could have taken six to twelve months due to poor prioritization. In our case, we were able to eliminate the risk of domain compromise within one month and address all single-host vulnerabilities by the second month, all done with a small team, thanks to our precise focus on what truly mattered.

The solution’s feature that allows security teams to fix and re-test vulnerabilities instantly is fantastic. With traditional penetration tests conducted by a human, the process is very expensive. You typically get two weeks of testing, then you make your fixes, and sometimes you can get them to retest. However, often you have to pay extra, and sometimes you just don't have enough time. This results in going another year hoping or thinking that vulnerabilities are fixed, but they might not be. With Horizon3, you can immediately retest vulnerabilities, and it will clearly indicate whether or not they are still present. Probably 20 times in the last year or two, we were told something was fixed when it actually wasn’t. Sometimes it’s due to a patch not being applied correctly, or perhaps they missed adding a registry key. There could be various root causes. The ability to dig in with our team and confirm whether a vulnerability is resolved is crucial. They can go back and fix it, and sometimes that takes multiple attempts. So this functionality is really valuable.

The platform's real attack capabilities have massively helped in identifying vulnerabilities in our on-prem systems. The best litmus test I can give is that during our previous penetration tests, attackers would easily gain domain admin access. However, with Horizon3, we can prioritize vulnerabilities and address them effectively. We recently conducted our first penetration test where the testers were completely unable to gain domain admin access, which is impressive given that this was done by a well-known player in penetration testing.

In terms of NodeZero's Endpoint Security Effectiveness feature's impact on our understanding of potential security threats, looking at it from the endpoint perspective really helps us identify what needs to be done to address vulnerabilities. Once we know what those are, we can go in and fix them. It’s pretty cool.

Prioritization is really key; it's a massive differentiator. The prioritization aspect is crucial. The ability to capture or crack credentials and then use that to move laterally and identify additional vulnerabilities is significant. Their password-cracking capability is a distinct function that is very helpful.

Additionally, when a new vulnerability, such as a zero-day exploit, is identified, they review your previous scans to determine if you might be vulnerable to it, and they proactively notify you. That's a huge benefit.

Also, the fact that they provide fixes alongside all their identified vulnerabilities means you don’t have to search for fixes yourself. They give you specific actions to take, which is incredibly helpful and saves a lot of time.

One significant area to focus on is external vulnerabilities, particularly in the web application space. This often requires a greater level of human ingenuity, as it typically involves navigating a webpage, creating an account, and testing for various vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection. Adding this capability would be a valuable enhancement.

I have been using The NodeZero Platform for approximately four to five years.

The only issue we’ve encountered is that sometimes the scans take a long time to complete. This happens when a credential is identified late in the scan, leading the system to attempt that credential on all the other hosts. As a result, the scans can run longer than expected and may even cause some memory issues. Fortunately, this is a relatively easy fix; you just need to increase the amount of memory on the server. Overall, it’s a minor issue.

The NodeZero Platform has unbelievable scalability. The limiting factor is just where you have the hardware infrastructure to be able to add additional VMs. Anywhere you can put a VM, you can run another concurrent scan.

I might sound like a fanboy, but I truly have about three and a half vendors that I really like. I'm generally tough on most of my other vendors, but these particular ones stand out because they are that good. From a tech support perspective, I would say they have some of the best support compared to any of the companies I work with. Microsoft, for example, is very hit or miss. Sometimes you get an excellent support representative, but I find that about 80% of the time, the person assisting you has no idea what they're doing. As for other decent options, CrowdStrike typically provides good support, but it seems like they focus more on managing tickets from an ITIL perspective, prioritizing the speed of ticket resolution over thoroughness. Zscaler is similar in that respect; They are better than Microsoft, but the quality of support can still be somewhat inconsistent.

Overall, when it comes to The NodeZero Platform's tech support, you can reach them via a chat message on their website, and they respond almost immediately. You're quickly connected with a very knowledgeable engineer, and you receive prompt responses. They are really good.

Positive

We have used Nessus, Qualys, and Tenable as alternatives to The NodeZero Platform. We were paying for Tenable. We were paying for Qualys. We basically stopped and moved to Horizon3.

If you were looking for a super wide net of everything that you could possibly try and identify, I think the other ones might be more holistic, but their prioritization is lacking, leaving you less secure because they do not help you prioritize.

It was super easy. From initially getting it set up to running it, it took about 24 hours. The biggest time requirement is actually getting a virtual machine (VM) stood up. If you can get a Linux VM set up, that’s the hardest part of the whole process. After that, it’s really easy. 

From a maintenance perspective, in terms of keeping the system healthy and functional, there isn’t much that we need to do; it pretty much runs itself. However, where we do put in work is in reviewing the outputs and determining our priorities. We then collaborate with the rest of the team, particularly on the server side, to address vulnerabilities and other issues that arise. So, while there is work involved, it’s not about maintaining the Horizon3 product itself, but rather managing the findings that we need to fix. 

The benefits of The NodeZero Platform are immediate. Just having access to a list of prioritized vulnerabilities and understanding how they were exploited in various attack chains was eye-opening. You might think you have a highly secure environment, but in reality, it can be compromised easily. This insight highlighted everything that needed improvement. Honestly, it's one of the most transformational technologies we've implemented in our company.

They offer really fantastic pricing. We've been with them for a long time, so I believe we might have a special deal. However, from conversations with other peers, it seems their pricing is very competitive as well.

I would rate The NodeZero Platform a 10 out of 10.

Positive

Positive

The solution is used for penetration testing.

Penetration testing and scans are useful features. These features are the reason why we started using the product.

We run the penetration testing and look at the reports. The reports are quite useless. We are looking for a different product. The tool did not help enhance our organization's cybersecurity posture. The reports had a lot of false positives. They didn't detect anything. The tool didn’t identify any vulnerabilities. The solution must detect threats and vulnerabilities.

I have been using the solution for about a year. I am using the latest version of the solution.

We didn’t have any issues with stability.

We didn’t have any issues with scalability. We didn’t need it.

My team interacts with the support team. I haven't heard any complaints.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. The initial deployment was easy.

We haven’t seen a return on investment.

We used another solution parallelly. We got help from a third-party vendor to do that. I will definitely not recommend the product to others. It was quite useless for us. It didn't give us any useful results. Overall, I rate the solution a one out of ten.