Juniper enhances network protection through Spotlight Secure upgrade

Juniper Networks is extending its Spotlight Secure threat intelligence platform to improve IT response to network threats.

The networking equipment company said Tuesday Spotlight secure is now open to more threat intelligent information feeds from other vendors, which can be linked to the firewall policies in the company’s  SRX Series Services Gateways for enterprises and service providers.

The result, Juniper said, is IT departments will be able to more quickly take action to push enforcement rules to SRX firewalls and cut off command-and-control (C&C) traffic, isolate infected systems and effectively combat a diversity of threats targeting networks.

IT pros can choose the threat detection technologies they want — including feeds customized to their business — rather than being locked into only the intelligence data offered by their firewall vendor, Juniper said.

Spotlight Secure aggregates threat feeds from multiple sources to deliver open, consolidated and actionable intelligence to SRX firewalls across the organization, Juniper said. These sources can include Juniper threat feeds, third-party threat feeds and threat detection technologies that IT can deploy. Administrators can define enforcement policies through a single management point.

The enhancements to Spotlight Secure include

• Threat Protection: New threat feeds for Spotlight Secure provide C&C and GeoIP feeds that not only adapt protection and firewall policies based on the severity of threats in the network, but also recognize and block traffic from specified countries and send selected traffic through additional security services. These new feeds augment Juniper’s attacker-device fingerprinting service, which is already available via Spotlight Secure.
• Tight Integration with the Network: Enhanced integration between Juniper’s Junos Space Security Director and Spotlight Secure links cloud-based threat feeds to the customer firewalls and provides a single aggregation point for multiple feeds into the firewall.
• Intelligent Firewall: Enhancements to the SRX firewall allow it to now consume and enforce policy based on the aggregated threat intelligence from detection technologies and feeds that reside both on premises and in the cloud.

“By creating an open framework that enables the aggregation of intelligence data from multiple feeds, we can provide application and user-level visibility.” Jonathan Davidson, Juniper’s senior vice-president and general manager for security, switching and solutions, said in a statement.