Aruba launches 360 Secure Fabric user behavioral analytics system

Aruba has beefed up the security of its wireless LAN portfolio with software that relies on user behavioral analytics and other features to guard against malicious activity.

Aruba 360 Secure Fabric -- available now in North America -- includes elements of pre-existing Aruba products, such as ClearPass and IntroSpect, armed with additional machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to allow customers to rely on user behavioral analytics to determine threats. It's based, in part, on software from Niara, which Aruba's parent, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, acquired earlier this year.

Instead of tracking signatures and known threats, an approach taken by many threat detection and firewall systems, Aruba 360 Secure Fabric attempts to spot small changes in behavior on a network to identify potential malicious activity, according to Larry Lunetta, Aruba's vice president of security solutions marketing.

If malicious activity is detected through IntroSpect, it will be handed off to Aruba's management app, ClearPass, for resolution. Although the new framework works best on Aruba products, it will also interoperate with infrastructure from different vendors, Lunetta said. The fabric also meshes with Aruba's Secure Core offering, which contains security tools embedded within the vendor's line of access points, wireless controllers, and core and aggregation switches.

Lunetta said Aruba 360 Secure Fabric is an attempt to recognize the changing nature of enterprise network security threats, which increasingly encompass ransomware attacks and situations where a breach at a contractor introduces malware that may remain dormant for months.

"We haven't seen a postmortem on Equifax, but it was probably a similar circumstance," Lunetta said of the hack that potentially compromised the information of more than 143 million Americans. Most of all, the new offering is aimed at reducing the manual labor involved in IT security operations, he said.