RA Security Systems ( F )

RA Security Systems (http://www.rasecurity.com) offers Managed Information Security Services for Business, Government and Law Enforcement. We found their website the same way that we found the others, with Google.

At first glance our initial opinion of the RA Security Systems website was that it was poorly organized, was written in a very unclear manner, and didn't describe much about the services being offered in any technical way. In fact, the descriptions that we did read either didn't make much sense to us or didn't appear to have much value with respect to IT Security.

For example, when we click on the "Products & Services" tab on the RA Security Systems website, the first thing that we see is a triangle, a list of strange product names on the right, and an opening sentence that reads "The extensive vulnerabilities inherent in today's networked economy require technical and operational infrastructures aligned to unique business environments." We want to ask, does anyone have any idea what that means?

When we decided to review the "Products" to the right of the RA Security Systems website, we didn't feel that much more impressed. For example their "Log File Analysis" product called "RaBox" doesn't really perform an analysis of your log files. In fact, all that it seems to based on the website description is record your log files. Isn't that what syslogd will do if you set it to run without the -s flag and syslogd is free? So why would anyone buy that? We'd rather use splunk!

Here's another odd service offering that RA Security Systems offers. They offer a "Host Intrusion Detection" service with the following description. "RSS maintains the ability to detect files system changes on both Windows, UNIX and Apple hosts (> OSX). This service will not be performed regularly rather on an ad-hoc basis during times of attack mitigation or digital investigation." The service will not be performed regularly? If anyone from RA Security Systems reads this blog, would you be kind enough to explain this to all of us? What do you mean by "not be performed regularly."

Lastly, when reading the front page on the RA Security Website we noticed that they said that they were founded in 1994, back in the day when the movie "Hackers" was cool (well not really). When we decided to do a "whois rasecurity.com" we saw that the domain was created on April 10th 2003. How could an IT Security Services Provider that has been in business since 1994 just register its domain in 2003? Just doesn't add up.

Anyway and as usual, we're not here to bash anyone. We're here to expose the truth about Professional IT Security Service Providers so that you don't find out the hard way. Our reviews will always be honest, direct, and at times harsh or even complimenting. If you end up getting reviewed by us and do not agree with our review, please leave us a comment and we'll listen to what you have to say. Thanks for reading!