HPE Aruba’s latest Niara enhancements evade advanced security breaches

BENGALURU: Following last week’s acquisition of user and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA) Niara, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, has reinforced its new capabilities for the Niara behavioral analytics solution to better protect data and high-value corporate assets.

According to HPE, the latest Niara enhancements are designed to eliminate security concerns caused by one of the most significant challenges facing security teams – when advanced, next-generation attacks breach perimeter-based security systems such as firewalls and security information event managers (SIEMs).

These types of attacks typically go undetected and have unrestricted access across an organization’s entire infrastructure, resulting in significant risks to conventional users and devices, as well as to Internet of Things (IoT) that are used to control equipment on factory floors and smart buildings.

Hence HPE indicates that to help address these issues, new Niara machine-learning and incident investigation workflow features, including Adaptive Learning and Analyst Playbooks, enable more precise attack detection for high-value assets and devices and users, resulting in faster decision making for remediation and response. When these new Niara features are combined with Aruba’s industry-leading ClearPass Policy Manager, individual incidents that reach a certain risk score within the Niara solution (ranging from 1 to 100) can use pre-defined ClearPass policies to automatically quarantine, or completely shut off network access, providing security teams with additional time to thoroughly investigate the incidents.

“It’s no secret that today’s advanced threats are more easily penetrating legacy perimeter security systems and, once inside, have complete, unfettered access to multitudes of corporate data, as well as IoT devices that control many operations within factories and buildings,” said Robert Westervelt, security research manager at IDC. “Firewalls, security information management systems, and other perimeter systems remain highly useful and necessary weapons against attacks. However, interior-based solutions that leverage behavioral analysis, combined with policy enforcement solutions that work harmoniously with the majority of perimeter-based tools, are today’s best-available ‘one-two punch’ defense.”