Cloudera and Intel have jointly announced the development of a new open source project to Apache Software Foundation. Called Apache Spot, the new project was originally surfaced as Open Network Insights (ONI) back in February to help Intel engineers monitor cybersecurity.
Apache Spot focuses on big data analytics and machine learning. The software project has been accepted in the ASF Incubator to enable cybersecurity practices for the open source world and address the need for agility.
“Spot enables identification of threats through anomalous event detection using both supervised and unsupervised machine learning. However, Spot’s open data model strategy aims to extend Spot’s existing capabilities to unlock a broader set of cybersecurity use cases than are currently supported,” the Cloudera team wrote in a blog post.
Leveraging Apache Hadoop, Spot offers log management and data storage scale. Apache Spark also uses machine learning to filter bad traffic and reduce instances of online attacks.
According to Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudera, the prime idea behind Apache Spot is to create a common data model that can help developers with new analytical capabilities to fight against cybersecurity issues.
Apache Spot is also capable of analysing billions of events to detect unknown and insider threats. The open source platform primarily uses machine learning to filter bad traffic and categorise the network traffic behavior. A shortlist of security threats is curated based on context enrichment, whitelisting, noise filtering and heuristics of the data.
Spot lets developers easily integrate cross-application data to give better enterprise visibility and analytic functionality. Also, the data models provide organisations the ability to share analytics of newly discovered threats.
In addition to Cloudera and Intel, companies like eBay, Webroot, Jask, Cloudwick, Endgame and Cybraics have contributed to the project. The entire open source community has also provided a ground to defeat some advanced cyber threats.
