Juniper software triggers network response to threats

Juniper Networks continues to grow its enterprise cloud-security family with a new product that promises to protect application workloads in any cloud or on-premises environment.

The company rolled out Juniper Cloud Workload Protection package–a  lightweight software agent that the company says controls application execution and monitors application behavior to help businesses spot and fix anomalies.

The idea is to provide protection from attackers looking to exploit application vulnerabilities, said Kate Adam, senior director of security product marketing for Juniper Networks. 

“When application code is written, it sometimes contains errors which present opportunities that attackers can use to exploit the underlying resources and process or workloads that power the application, such as databases and data collectors,” Adam said. “Just look at the latest public breaches. Most, if not all of them involve the successful exploitation of one or more application vulnerabilities.”

Cloud Workload Protection deploys in Docker, Kubernetes, and Amazon Web Services’ Fargate container-deployment services at the container, host, or VM level.

In addition, there is a small application-specific component that is loaded at runtime, similar to what is used in application performance-monitoring solutions, Adam said. 

The agent moniors application functions and its calls to services to understand what the app was intended to do, then looks for deviations from that vs. what’s happening in real-time. The deviations are likely potential exploits, and  many times vulnerability remediation is done automatically without admin intervention, Adam said. 

The agent also notifies Juniper’s sRX virtual firewalls, which can further augment risk-mitigation by enforcing segmentation. Automated threat response with built-in, real-time telemetry helps security teams detect threats and block them across the entire network, Adam said.

The new agent is part of Juniper’s overarching Connected Security architecture that features myriad enterprise security components from its central Security Director and Policy Enforcer to threat detection offering up a software-defined containment system to protect networks and reduce security concerns, Juniper says.

Cloud Workload Protection will be available in September.