Deep Secure Content Threat Removal Platform

Cyberattacks are increasing and are unlikely to decline, forcing organizations to defend in conditions where the attack surface is expanding and attacks often remain undetected for a critical period. The most dangerous window is when attacks are actively running but not yet identified; this “unknown” phase can be immediate in visible ransomware cases or persist for years. Even after identification, traditional security approaches can take hours to days (or longer) to provide effective protection, leaving time for additional attackers to exploit the same weaknesses. As a result, signature-based anti-malware is necessary but insufficient; organizations also need technologies that protect against unknown and zero-day attacks.

At the same time, Digital Transformation requires constant information exchange with partners, customers, and users. Ensuring access to clean, secure business content becomes central to enabling collaboration and maintaining trust. To address threats “beyond detection,” several complementary approaches are highlighted: cognitive security using AI for anomaly identification, isolation for risky activities like web browsing, and Content Disarm and Reconstruct methods that strip potentially dangerous elements from content.

Content Threat Removal advances further by extracting useful business information, discarding everything else, and reconstructing entirely new “clean” data—leaving malicious components behind. Deep Secure, founded in 2009 and headquartered in the UK, provides products spanning deep content inspection “guards” and a newer Content Threat Removal Platform. The platform transforms data through three components (extract, verify, rebuild), deployable on hardware, virtualized environments, or cloud. It supports application-level proxies for mail, file transfer, and web, plus ICAP “sidecar” integration with existing gateways and firewalls, and targets threats including steganography in images. While transformation can risk performance impact, Deep Secure emphasizes non-real-time channels and claims no measurable negative effect compared to detection-based approaches, positioning the platform as a strong component for securing cross-boundary content exchange.

• The most critical attack phase is when attacks are running but have not yet been identified.
• After attacks are identified, traditional approaches can take hours to days or longer to provide effective protection.
• Signature-based anti-malware protects against known attacks but is not sufficient on its own.
• The attack surface is expanding due to IoT growth, increased communication, and distributed/hybrid IT using cloud services.
• Deep Secure is a UK-based cybersecurity software provider founded in 2009 with over 50 staff.
• Deep Secure serves customers in the UK, Europe, the US, the Middle East, and the APAC region.
• Deep Secure offers Mail, Web, XML, and File “guards” for deep content inspection.
• The Content Threat Removal Platform has three core functions: extracting information, verifying content, and building new data to carry it.
• The platform can be deployed on physical hardware, virtualized infrastructure, or in the cloud.
• The platform includes capabilities aimed at threats concealed in images via steganography (“stegware”).

• “Traditional security technologies such as signature-based Anti-Malware that protect against the ‘known’ can only be one element in a protection strategy, as they are not sufficient anymore.”
• “The need is for additional security technologies that go beyond detection and protect against so called ‘zero-day attacks’…”
• “Establishing a track record for guaranteeing its customers, business partners, and users access to clean, secure business content is essential…”
• “Providing secure data is about removing barriers for successful collaboration.”
• “Content Threat Removal as a rather new approach goes one step further.”
• “It focuses on analyzing content to find the useful business content, discarding everything else, and then building new data to carry the information safely to its destination.”
• “By doing this, everything that could be malicious is simply left behind.”
• “The goal is delivering secured content immediately, instead of blocking information flow.”
• “Another highlight of this product is that it prevents covert data loss…”
• “Support for more specialist and proprietary formats… is provided by an optional add-on ‘sidecar’ capability, which is developed on a per-customer basis.”