Instart Logic brings Helios AIDriven security out into the open

In ancient mythology, Helios was the Greek god of the sun streaking across the heavens in a chariot shining much-needed light onto a dark and dangerous world. That’s exactly what Instart Logic, is doing with their latest announcement of Helios - "using artificial intelligence to illuminate and solve today’s most challenging digital security issues."

Web application attacks are on the rise. A 2012 study found the average company’s cost for every minute of downtime during a DDoS attack was $22,000. Helios, part of Instart Logic’s AppShield family of end-to-end security solutions, uses artificial intelligence, interpretable machine learning, and automation to discover subtle web breaches hidden in billions of applications logs that have been nearly impossible for humans to detect using traditional security technologies.

“Instart Logic has been at the forefront of bringing advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to market to solve the world’s most difficult application performance challenges. With the launch of Helios, we are now extending our breakthrough AI capabilities into the world of web application security,” said Peter Blum, vice president of product management at Instart Logic. “Websites are under 24/7 attack from all over the world, and every day new attack schemes are being developed by bad actors. What’s needed in this increasingly treacherous environment is a way to continuously evaluate all web traffic for ‘unknown unknowns,’ and that is the explicit design philosophy underpinning all of Helios. There truly is nothing else like it on the market today.”

Three major challenges

1.) In application security, a key challenge is finding anomalies. A traditional system relies on predefined rules to catch attacks. However, previously unknown and subtle attacks cannot be caught by rules. Helios was built expressly to discover previously unknown anomalies and subtle attacks in systems operating at cloud-scale.

2.) The second challenge Helios addresses is the size and scale of log files. Existing security technologies simply cannot keep up with the immense volume of log data. When attacks are found, discovery time can be so long that the attacks can cause great harm by the time they’re discovered. Helios automates and speeds up the attack discovery process by using artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Helios is capable of analyzing billions of log messages in minutes.

3.) The third challenge is that both web application code and attacks change every day, and new vulnerabilities are constantly emerging. Whatever solution an enterprise uses must accommodate constant change and keep security policies up to date. With so much change, there is minimal room for error. So supervised machine learning algorithms that rely on training datasets fail to solve this problem. Helios uses advanced algorithms that are able to discover anomalies without the need for training.