UPDATED 02:58 EDT / JUNE 04 2015

NEWS

Niara Inc. staves off cyberattacks with new Security Intelligence Solution

Cyber attacks are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and covert, which means intruders can remain undetected for weeks and even months at a time.

Now, cyber security startup Niara Inc. has emerged from stealth with a Security Intelligence Solution to combat these kinds of covert attacks, combing security analytics with forensics to help organizations uncover hidden threats within their networks.

The Niara Security Intelligence Solution is based on Big Data architecture, and analyzes security data from disparate sources to ensure organizations can identify and respond to the most sophisticated, multi-stage attacks that existing monitoring solutions might have missed. It does so by gathering data from sources like TAP and SPAN ports on routers, logs, IDSes, SIEMs and other third-party products that make up the network. The Niara Analyzer tool then crunches that data, correlating events that could indicate the presence of a threat, assigning a severity score and issuing alerts for security teams to investigate.

Niara’s goal is to seek out attacks that traditional security platforms – such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and antivirus – might miss, by linking together events that seem innocous on their own, but could indicate multi-stage attacks when strung together, Sriram Ramachandran, CEO of Niara, told eWeek. Niara also helps security teams to filter out the ‘noise’ generated by other platforms so they know exactly what is and isn’t a sign of a threat.

Niara aggregates each threat it picks up into the context of entities – users, devices and applications. These entities are then profiled based on their historical behavior, and also their behavior in comparison to other entities in the network. This way, Niara can see if one user in an organization’s sales department is doing something different from other sales users. It can spot if a device is attempting to make network connections that its peer devices do not – both of these scenarios could represent potential threats.

“In our system we collect all the information we have, including timelines, analytics and forensics, into something called the entity 360 view,” Ramachandran said. “Users get a rich visual panel for each entity.”

At first glance, Niara’s solution seems similar to what other security analytics startups are doing, but Ramachandran says it’s combination of forensics and analytics is unique in this emerging field.

“We are building analytics and forensics into a single unified system, and that’s our core innovation,” Ramachandran told eWeek.

At least the venture capitalists seem convinced. Niara has already won two rounds of funding from Venrock, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Index Ventures, totaling $29.4 million.

Niara was founded by Ramachandran and other security experts in 2013. The company’s name translates as “haystack” in Spanish, but rather than searching for needles in a haystack, Ramachandran says Niara is more about threading those needles together after they’ve been found.

Image credit: DasWortgewand via Pixabay.com

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