Brings Award-Winning Automated Behavioural Analytics to the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform
Palo Alto Networks has announced its acquisition of LightCyber, a privately held cybersecurity company that has developed award-winning, highly automated and accurate behavioural analytics technology. Under the terms of the agreement, Palo Alto Networks has acquired LightCyber for $105 million in cash.
Recognised by Gartner in two recent market guides*, LightCyber has been leading the industry in the development of automated behavioural analytics capabilities, using sophisticated machine learning to quickly, efficiently and accurately identify attacks based on identifying behavioural anomalies inside the network.
Palo Alto Networks will continue to offer the LightCyber products and support existing customer implementations while it engineers the technology into the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform by the end of the calendar year. Bringing behavioural analytics to the platform will enhance its automated threat prevention capabilities and the ability for customer organisations to prevent cyber breaches throughout the entire attack life cycle.
QUOTES:
- “The LightCyber team’s vision to bring automation and machine learning to bear in addressing the very difficult task of identifying otherwise undetected and often very sophisticated attacks inside the network is well-aligned with our platform approach. This technology will complement the existing automated threat prevention capabilities of our platform to help organisations not only improve but also scale their security protections to prevent cyber breaches.” – Mark McLaughlin, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks
- “Palo Alto Networks has been driving a paradigm shift in the security industry with its natively engineered and highly automated Next-Generation Security Platform designed to change the equation in how organisations prevent cyber breaches. We are pleased to join the Palo Alto Networks team, combining our technology innovations and accelerating adoption of behavioural analytics to help organisations bolster their defences against the advanced and sophisticated adversaries they are facing today.” – Gonen Fink, CEO of LightCyber
Automated Attack Behaviour Analytics Enhances Breach Prevention
According to a report by the Ponemon Institute**, when attackers successfully find their way into a network, there is an industry average dwell time of approximately five months to discover their activity. During that time, an advanced attacker can initiate command and control, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. This kind of dwell time and advancement in the attack lifecycle can lead to extensive damage and loss of confidential data.
Common approaches to this problem include third-party, log-based collection and analysis tools that are often error-prone, limited in visibility, lack important context, are labor-intensive, require a data scientist to investigate false positives and tune for accurate outcomes, and lack enforcement capabilities.
To address these challenges, reduce attacker dwell time, minimise damage done and prevent breaches, the LightCyber technology employs highly accurate and automated machine learning techniques to analyse user and entity activity and then identifies and protects against anomalous activities that are indicative of an active attack.
This behavioural attack detection capability complements the existing protections delivered by the Palo Alto Networks platform to help security team members focus on only the most meaningful alerts and improve the time to breach response and prevention.
- To learn more about the LightCyber technology and how it will enhance the Palo Alto Networks platform, visit: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/technologies/automated-behavioral-analytics.
- To learn more about the Palo Alto Networks security platform, visit: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/products/designing-for-prevention/security-platform.
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is the next-generation security company, leading a new era in cybersecurity by safely enabling applications and preventing cyber breaches for tens of thousands of organisations worldwide. Built with an innovative approach and highly differentiated cyberthreat prevention capabilities, our game-changing security platform delivers security far superior to legacy or point products, safely enables daily business operations, and protects an organisation’s most valuable assets. Find out more at www.paloaltonetworks.com.
