Netflix Unleashes Security Watchdog 'FIDO'

In a blog post this afternoon, Netflix Inc (NASDAQ: NFLX) announced the open source release of its Fully Integrated Defense Operation (FIDO). Fido is Netflix’s automated system for recognizing, identifying and responding to network security incidents.

What Is FIDO?

In the past, the protocol for identifying and responding to security threats at Netflix has required a large amount of time and manual labor. FIDO, which the company has been using for over four years now, is Netflix’s way of providing an automated solution for many minor threats without requiring nearly as much manual engineering labor.

Why Does Netflix Need FIDO?

The need for an automated system has become even more urgent in recent years, as the numbers, types, and complexity of security events continues to grow at a rapid pace.

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“Netflix, like all organizations, has a finite amount of resources to combat this phenomenon, so we built FIDO to help. FIDO is an orchestration layer that automates the incident response process by evaluating, assessing and responding to malware and other detected threats,” Netflix explained in the post.

How Does The Process Work?

FIDO begins by receiving an event from one of its many detection systems, including firewalls, IDS and anti-malware systems. Once FIDO has detected an event, it automatically gathers data on the event, including the targeted machine and user. In addition, FIDO queries both internal data sources and external threat feeds to determine whether an event could be a false positive or a particularly severe threat.

Finally, FIDO assigns a score to the event based on the data it collects and uses the score to determine the next course of action. Possible proactive measures include disabling an account, ending a VPN session or disabling a network port. However, FIDO could also simply email the Netflix security team a breakdown of its findings.

Now that FIDO is open source, Netflix is encouraging users to submit suggestions for improving the software.