Following the discovery of the largest known data breach in history, Cloudera and Intel announced Wednesday that they have donated a new open source project to the Apache Software Foundation, aiming to use big data analytics and machine learning for cybersecurity.
Originally created by Intel and launched as the Open Network Insight (ONI) project in February, the effort is now called Apache Spot and has been accepted into the ASF Incubator.
“The idea is, let’s create a common data model that every application developer can benefit from while bringing new analytics capabilities to address cybersecurity issues ,” Mike Olson, Cloudera co-founder and chief strategy officer, told an audience at the Strata+Hadoop World show in New York. “This is a big deal and could have a huge impact around the world.”
Powered by a big data platform , Spot uses Apache Hadoop for infinite log management and data storage scale, along with Apache Spark for machine learning and near-real-time anomaly detection. The software can analyze billions of events to identify unknown and confidential threats and provide new network visibility.
Essentially, it uses machine learning as a filter to separate bad traffic from good and to characterize the behavior of network traffic. It also uses a process including: text enrichment, noise filtering, whitelisting, and heuristics to produce a list of the most likely security threats.
By providing common open data models for the network, endpoint, and user, Spot makes it easier to integrate cross-application data for better business visibility and new analytic capabilities. These open data models make it easier for organizations to share analytics as well as new threats that are discovered.
Other funders of the project so far include eBay, Webroot, Jask, Cybraics, Cloudwick and Endgame.
“The open source community is the perfect environment for Apache Spot to take a collaborative approach to fighting cybercrime,” said Ron Kasabian, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Solutions Group. “The combined expertise of our partners will further advance Apache Spot’s open data vision and lay the foundation for collaboration on the world’s toughest and ever-evolving cybersecurity analytics challenges.”
