Juniper Launches Cloud-Based Security Intelligence Service

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Juniper Launches Cloud-Based Security Intelligence Service

Juniper's Junos Spotlight Secure service will give businesses greater insight into attackers, threats and the devices used in attacks.

Juniper Networks is looking to give organizations the up-to-date security intelligence they need to protect themselves against cyber attacks on their networks.

At the RSA Conference this week, Juniper unveiled a number of new and enhanced security products, in particularly Junos Spotlight Secure, a cloud-based service designed to give users greater intelligence about attackers, threats and individual devices, and will spread that intelligence across various network and security products.

In addition, Juniper and RSA, the security unit of storage giant EMC, are expanding their relationship through a technology partnership that will result in a high level of intelligence sharing between Juniper's Junos Spotlight Security service and RSA's Live threat delivery service, and using RSA's Security Analytics tool to give customers greater insight into the security threats they're facing.

"Next-generation security must be built on automated and actionable intelligence that can be quickly shared to meet the demands of modern and evolving networks," Nawaf Bitar, senior vice president and general manager of Juniper's security business unit, said in a statement. "This is only possible if you are able to collect definitive information about attackers. Junos Spotlight Secure provides the platform to deliver advanced intelligence with device-level attacker tracking. This integrated approach improves security intelligence, provides collective defense against attackers and delivers true defense in-depth for the data center."

Juniper officials argue that businesses need more than just the IP address of their attackers, but also the devices used in the attacks, and then have the ability to take the intelligence gathered and quickly bring it into the data center and into the network. They are positioning their Junos Spotlight Secure intelligence service as the place where security intelligence on attackers and threats is consolidated and then sent in real time to Juniper's security offerings to act on.

Using the cloud database, organizations can identify attackers by more than 200 unique attributes, and then keep track of them. Through Junos WebApp Secure software, an attacker can be "fingerprinted" and that information can be shared with other subscribers, bringing the real-time security to disparate networks. The goal is to enable businesses to keep out the bad guys while letting legitimate users securely access the network.

Juniper's Junos WebApp and the company's SRX Series service gateways are the first company products to leverage the Spotlight Secure offering, according to officials.

Junos WebApp Secure—formerly called Mykonos, a company Juniper bought in 2012—is used to integrate the intelligence from other sources that has come from Spotlight Secure, and then lets other Juniper products leverage the intelligence to more accurately defend against attacks. At the same time, Junos WebApp Secure uses Juniper's Intrusion Deception technology to not only profile and fingerprint attackers, but also to misdirect them, according to Juniper.

In addition, Junos WebApp Secure will be integrated into the SRX Series service gateways, enabling the gateways to leverage the intelligence from Spotlight Secure to block attackers, company officials said, noting it will be particularly effective against botnets and large-scale Web attacks.

Along with Spotlight Secure, Juniper also announced Junos DDoS Secure, a distributed denial-of-service protection system aimed at guarding Websites and Web applications against high-volume attacks as well as “low and slow” app attacks. It can either be deployed as software through a virtual machine in cloud environments or as a hardware appliance.

Juniper officials said they will be able to also take advantage of their software-defined networking (SDN) strategy to more quickly bring intelligence to the networks and deploy security services across networks. Organizations will be able to take advantage of Juniper's Junos Space Security Director, which provides centralized management in an SDN environment.

In extending their partnership, Juniper and RSA not only will focus on protecting corporate networks against attacks, but also on bringing greater mobile security services that tie strong authentication with secure remote access. The companies want to get RSA's mobile authentication technologies to interoperate with Juniper's Junos Pulse SSL Secure for remote access to a business' infrastructure.

The companies also want to make sure that the Junos Pulse SSL Secure offering can authenticate native mobile application access, creating a single access point for VPNs and mobile applications.

"Two of the most common requests we get from customers are about improving information sharing and enabling them to deploy greater security on mobile devices," Art Coviello, executive chairman of RSA and executive vice president at EMC, said in a statement. "This expanded technology partnership would enable RSA and Juniper to help address both of those key requirements for customers, and set the stage for increased collaboration on a wider range of advanced security challenges."