UPDATED 07:45 EDT / AUGUST 03 2021

SECURITY

Juniper’s Cloud Workload Protection helps defend against application exploits in real-time

Juniper Networks Inc. is boosting application security today with the launch of a new Cloud Workload Protection offering that’s able to defend apps running in the cloud or on-premises from exploit-based attacks as they happen.

Application vulnerabilities are one of the most common causes of data breaches. Errors in application code can present opportunities for hackers to get inside the app and exploit the underlying resources and processes, including databases and data collectors that can give them access to potentially damaging information.

Defending against vulnerabilities isn’t easy, because most of the time organizations aren’t even aware that a vulnerability exists in their software. And when they do discover a vulnerability, it’s often only because someone has already exploited it.

This is the loophole Juniper is aiming to fix with its new Cloud Workload Protection tool. It’s a light software agent that runs alongside each app, controlling its execution and monitoring its behavior, as well as the context of that behavior.

By doing this, the agent knows what the app is supposed to be doing at all times. So if the app suddenly starts doing something it shouldn’t be doing, the agent knows something is wrong. In that case it can take immediate action to prevent data breaches, without any human intervention, Juniper said.

“Juniper Cloud Workload Protection ensures that production applications always have a safety net against vulnerability exploits, keeping business-critical services connected and protected,” the company said in a blog post.

The offering provides a fairly comprehensive array of capabilities to defend applications. The most notable one is what Juniper calls “signatureless run-time application self-protection”, which enables apps to protect themselves against malicious actions such as data theft in real-time, without any manual intervention. The offering also has memory-based attack prevention capabilities that help to guard against “advanced memory-based attacks” such as fileless, return-oriented programming and buffer overflow attacks.

Juniper Cloud Workload Protection helps on the investigative side too. If an attack is discovered, the software will provide information on the attempt to security teams so they can locate where the vulnerability exists more easily and try to close it. It also provides telemetry data on the app’s connectivity and topology to help teams get a better understanding of what the attackers aims were. False alarms are minimized through optimized control flow integrity technology that helps to validate the execution of applications and detection of attacks without using behavior or signatures.

Further, the offering helps stop any attack spread through an organization’s network. It implements something called zero-trust microsegmentation to shield the application’s resources. “Automated threat response with built-in, real-time telemetry helps security teams detect threats once and block them across the entire network,” the company explained.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that in order for security software to stay on top of enterprise threats it needs to become more autonomous. “This means it must become self-driving in terms of threat detection and remediation,” he said. “Juniper is undertaking that very first step with Juniper Cloud Workload Protection, now we have to see how well it performs in the daily battle of enterprise threads.”

Juniper Cloud Workload Protection is a part of the company’s zero-trust security offering, Juniper Connected Security, which grants access to applications based on details about the user and the device that’s being used.

Image: rawpixel/freepik

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