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Bob Gourley

Breaking News: Microsoft Partners With World Class Best Cyber Firm Kyrus Tech Inc and Helps Defeat Some Very Bad Criminals

We have previously written about Kyrus Tech Inc and have highlighted their unique capability called Carbon Black. We have worked with the team of experts there in the past and I am very proud to have been professionally associated with Michael Tanji since we were both in government in the mid 1990’s. We have also been privileged to have worked with and learned from cyber teams at Microsoft for years and know many great professionals there.  In part because of that it was especially great to read the press release below that shows how Microsoft and Kyrus Tech have combined their strengths to help reduce a particularly nasty vector of cyber crime. Their collaborative work has helped disrupt the massive Zeus cybercrime operation.

For details on the role of Kyrus see: http://www.kyrus-tech.com/blog/

We also recommend a review of the press release below from: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2012/mar12/03-25CybercrimePR.mspx

Microsoft Joins Financial Services Industry to Disrupt Massive Zeus Cybercrime Operation That Fuels Worldwide Fraud and Identity Theft

Microsoft collaborates with financial services industry in unprecedented cross-industry action against notorious cybercrime operation behind online fraud and identity theft.

REDMOND, Wash. — March 25, 2012 — In its most complex effort to disrupt botnets to date, Microsoft Corp., in collaboration with the financial services industry — including the Financial Services – Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and NACHA – The Electronic Payments Association — as well as Kyrus Tech Inc., announced it has successfully executed a coordinated global action against some of the most notorious cybercrime operations that fuel online fraud and identity theft. With this legal and technical action, a number of the most harmful botnets using the Zeus family of malware worldwide have been disrupted in an unprecedented, proactive cross-industry action against this cybercriminal organization.

Through an extensive and collaborative investigation into the Zeus threat, Microsoft and its banking, finance and technical partners discovered that once a computer is infected with Zeus, the malware can monitor a victim’s online activity and automatically start keylogging, or recording a person’s every keystroke, when a person types in the name of a financial institution or ecommerce site. With this information, cybercriminals can steal personal information that can be used for identity theft or to fraudulently make purchases or access other private accounts. In fact, since 2007, Microsoft has detected more than 13 million suspected infections of the Zeus malware worldwide, including approximately 3 million computers in the United States alone.

“With this action, we’ve disrupted a critical source of money-making for digital fraudsters and cyberthieves, while gaining important information to help identify those responsible and better protect victims,” said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit. “The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit has long been working to combat cybercrime operations, and today is a particularly important strike against cybercrime that we expect will be felt across the criminal underground for a long time to come.”

This disruption was made possible through a successful pleading before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, which allowed Microsoft and its partners to conduct a coordinated seizure of command and control servers running some of the worst known Zeus botnets. Because the botnet operators used Zeus to steal victims’ online banking credentials and transfer stolen funds, FS-ISAC and NACHA joined Microsoft as plaintiffs in the civil suit, and Kyrus Tech Inc. served as a declarant in the case. Other organizations, including F-Secure, also provided supporting information for the case.

As a part of the operation, on March 23, Microsoft and its co-plaintiffs, escorted by the U.S. Marshals, seized command and control servers in two hosting locations, Scranton, Pa., and Lombard, Ill., to seize and preserve valuable data and virtual evidence from the botnets for the case. Microsoft and its partners took down two Internet Protocol addresses behind the Zeus command and control structure, and Microsoft is currently monitoring 800 domains secured in the operation, which are helping identify thousands of computers infected by Zeus.

This is the second time Microsoft has conducted physical seizures in a botnet operation, and it is the first time other organizations have joined Microsoft as plaintiffs in the legal case for a botnet operation. This is also the first operation for Microsoft that involved the simultaneous disruption of multiple operating botnets in a single action and is the first known time the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act has been applied as the legal basis in a consolidated civil case to charge all those responsible in the use of a botnet.

“As crimes against banks and their customers move from stickups to mouse clicks, we’re also using our own mouse clicks — as well as the law — to help protect consumers and businesses,” said Greg Garcia, a spokesperson for the three major financial industry associations that worked with Microsoft on this initiative. “Disrupting the Zeus botnets is just one strike in our long-term commitment to help defend and protect people.”

Because of the complexities of these targets, unlike Microsoft’s previous botnet operations, the goal of this action was not to permanently shut down all impacted Zeus botnets. However, this action is expected to significantly impact the cybercriminals’ operations and infrastructure, advance global efforts to help victims regain control of their infected computers, and also help further investigations against those responsible for the threat. As with its previous botnet operations, Microsoft will now use the intelligence gained from this operation to partner with Internet service providers and Community Emergency Response Teams around the world to help rescue people’s computers from the control of Zeus, helping to reduce the size of the threat that these botnets pose and to help make the Internet safer for consumers and businesses worldwide. Together, these aspects of the operation are expected to undermine the criminal infrastructure that relies on these botnets every day to make money and to help provide new tools for the industry to work together to proactively fight cybercrime.

Michael Tanji, chief security officer of Kyrus Tech Inc., who helped analyze the Zeus malware and determine which botnets were the most dangerous said, “We are proud to have played a part in this groundbreaking effort and hope that others will start working together to combat malicious activity at the same scale as it is being perpetrated.”

There are steps consumers and businesses can take to better help protect themselves from becoming victims of malware, fraud and identity theft. All computer users should exercise safe practices, such as running up-to-date and legitimate computer software, firewall protection, and antivirus or antimalware protection. People should also exercise caution when surfing the Web and clicking on ads or email attachments that may prove to be malicious. For computer owners worried their computers might be infected, Microsoft offers free information and malware cleaning tools athttp://support.microsoft.com/botnets that can help people remove Zeus and other malware from their computers. For businesses looking for more information about corporate account takeover issues, including those due to malicious software, a fraud advisory from FS-ISAC, the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service can be found at http://www.fsisac.com/files/public/db/p265.pdf.

More information about today’s news and the coordinated action against Zeus is available athttp://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/dcu. Legal documentation in the case can be found athttp://www.zeuslegalnotice.com.

About FS-ISAC

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center was formed in 1999 and is a non-profit, private financial sector initiative. It was designed and developed and is owned by financial institutions. Its primary function is to share timely, relevant and actionable information of physical and cyber security threat and incident information to help mitigate the risk associated with these threats. [http://www.fsisac.com/]

About NACHA – The Electronic Payments Association

NACHA manages the development, administration, and governance of the ACH Network, the backbone for the electronic movement of money and data. The ACH Network provides a safe, secure, and reliable network for direct account-to-account consumer, business, and government payments. Annually, it facilitates billions of Direct Deposit via ACH and Direct Payment via ACH transactions. Used by all types of financial institutions, the ACH Network is governed by the fair and equitable NACHA Operating Rules, which guide risk management and create payment certainty for all participants. As a not-for-profit association, NACHA represents more than 10,000 financial institutions via 17 regional payments associations and direct membership. Through its industry councils and forums, NACHA brings together payments system stakeholders to foster dialogue and innovation to strengthen the ACH Network. To learn more, please visit www.nacha.org.

AboutKyrus Tech, Inc.

Kyrus is a security innovation company. We have deep expertise in vulnerability research, reverse engineering, computer forensics and custom software development. We apply those skills to conduct research and develop solutions for the business, critical infrastructure and national security communities. We strive to disrupt the status quo. We believe that approaching security problems from diverse perspectives and without preconceptions is the only way for security to become both a valued and a cost-effective capability.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed athttp://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

 

Avoiding Cyber Threat Amnesia

My involvement in the non-profit educational and research organization Cyber Conflict Studies Association over the last several years has led me to an observation about federal policy makers and cyber security. This observation probably applies to many commercial organizations and to academia (and possibly even to you) so we may be talking about human nature here. But the phenomenon was definitely clear by my review of historical documents and actions of the federal government. My hope is this review will help us address this in US policy.

What is amnesia? It is a condition where memory is lost. When it comes to the cyber threat to federal organizations we have a long list of evidence that this is occurring. The following is my list of evidence. I’m publishing it in the hopes that you can fill in the blanks on any other major events where our great institutions have learned and forgotten. We should study this phenomenon so we can prevent it in the future.

So, with that, below is the list of what I consider to be the federal government’s top “Wake-Up Calls” that the cyber threat is real:

  • 1970 and 1971 – The Defense Science Board publishes what will be known as the “Ware Report” highlighting the potential dangers to department information in the coming age of connected computing. This report was widely seen as a “wake up call” for computer security and caused changes at institutions like the National Security Agency to enhance the departments security posture.
  • Nov 1988 – The Morris Worm was released and propagated throughout internetworked systems including those of the federal government. This “wake up call” resulted in establishment of computer response organizations throughout DoD and also resulted in increased funding for computer security research being provided to academic organizations and institutions. The CERT/CC at Carnegie Mellon University was funded.
  • 1995 – The President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP) was widely regarded as a “wake up call” for the entire federal government and since it was extensively coordinated with industry and academia was also seen as a way forward in cybersecurity for the entire nation.
  • 1997 – Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre was quoted as saying “Solar Sunrise was a wake up call for DoD.” This activity resulted in increased funding to cyber defense organizations and the creation of a new joint activity called DoD’s “Joint Task Force Computer Network Defense” or JTF-CND (Gourley was first Director of Intelligence (J2) there).
  • 1998 Assistant Secretary of Defense Art Money was quoted as saying “Moonlight Maze was a wake up call for DoD.”  This activity resulted in enhanced counterintelligence resources and more information sharing across the DoD law enforcement and counterintelligence.
  • 2009 Director of National Intelligence Admiral Blair testified that “Buckshot Yankee was a wake up call” for the government. This activity resulted in more awareness and more funding for cyber security throughout the federal government.
  • 2010 Deputy Secretary of Defense Lynn writes that “Google’s Aurora attacks were a wake up call for us all.”  This wake up call resulted in stronger, deeper coordination across the federal space and underscored need for a DoD strategy.
  • 2011 Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bob Butler says “Wikileaks was a wake up call for DoD.”   This wake up call resulted in significant activities and planning across the federal space aimed at enhancing security of information from disclosure.

 

That is the list as I see it. Those are the wake-up calls that I know of. Can you add more?  Or perhaps a bigger question is, can you help find ways to prevent this continued pattern of waking up then going back to sleep?

One way to prevent this pattern is to be more proactive. Perhaps my next post will be on the list of significant proactive things the nation has done in cyber security. So far I only have two item on that list. 1) The all of government coordination activities of the Cyber Initiative. The bad news is that was long ago, and 2) The establishment of US Cyber Command.  Do you know of others so significant that would make that cut? What else should be done to mitigate Cyber Threat Amnesia?

For more on these topics see the CTOvision Guide to National Security Technology and

Want To Know The Future Of Enterprise IT? Track Venture Capital

I know of only three models that enterprise technologists can use to make accurate predictions of future technology, and all three models have failings.

The first model is to track mega trends in the IT industry. This provides broad insights on topics like Big Data, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Commoditization of IT, Social Media and Open Source Software, but the broad insights this model provides are frequently too general to guide the planning actions of IT professionals.

The second model is to make linear projections on the state of specific categories of IT. Assessments like these can help in the short term by informing IT planners on what to expect in areas like hardware, communications systems, storage systems, analytical tools, development environments, mobile devices and a wide range of other categories. But the problems with linear projections like these is that it is impossible to predict, with accuracy, when the linear trend breaks due to surprise and disruption. Projections like this are important, but they too are flawed.

The third method is to interact with people who are making the future. This is perhaps the best way to predict coming technology disruptions. If you can learn what today’s engineers are developing and if you can get a sense of which of these hold the greatest potential of adding value to the enterprise market it can help IT decision-makers better prepare for the future. The flaw in this model is that entrepreneurs and engineers are not always successful, but in general the Alan Kay observation that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it” holds true.

This third method happens to also be the most fun! Examining this element of the future means you can dive deep into study of the great techno-capitalists of our age. The founders and lead technologists of firms like Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Apple, HP, Dell, IBM continue to innovate and are important to track (and we do so at our Tech Titans list).  But increasingly it is the smaller disruptors that are causing the most change. To find and track these future disruptors we need to follow the investments of the great venture capital (VC) players.

Our interactions with VC have long influenced the firms we write about here and in our CTOlabs.com company directory and we will keep writing about the individual tech companies we believe should be on your radar. But we are also launching a new series of posts on the key VC firms we believe enterprise technologists should be tracking. We have overviews in the works now on:

And others are coming soon!  Stay tuned for more.

To ensure you are on distro for our posts on these and related topics, sign up now for our newsletter distribution at http://j.mp/ctonews

Related Posts:

CTO Guide to the Business of Artificial Intelligence

Blockchain Capital Closes New $150 Million Fund Focused on Crypto Ecosystem

Blockchain Capital: One of the earliest and most active investors in blockchain technologies

 

 

 

Mission Link: A collective of mission-focused providers of virtuous solutions

Mission Link is a Washington DC based collective of business executives and former national security leaders who come together to collaborate and innovate on better ways to serve important national missions.

A 2019 Update: Missionlink has transformed since the post below. If you are interested in networking with the group read below and contact us at OODA and we will get you an update.

From the MissionLinkDC site:

Connecting Decision Makers & Building a Community of Interest for National Security Focused Companies

Founded by a local group of prominent business executives and former national security leaders, MissionLink is an executive level forum designed to foster collaboration and innovation among CEOs, decision makers, critical thinkers and pacesetters from the most promising companies dedicated to the mission of defense, intelligence and national security.

MissionLink provides an opportunity for peer to peer networking, mentorship, and knowledge sharing in an intimate and private setting. Each month member CEOs engage with a panel of experts to discuss current issues facing their companies, exchange ideas, and meet other successful leaders in the field who can help guide them through the process of building great companies. Upon completion of each year’s class, the participants are invited to a formal graduation ceremony, in which participants of MissionLink will explore ways to give back to community and those that support the mission of national security.

For more information see: http://missionlinkdc.org

A CTO Perspective: Consider The Message The Elders of the Internet Have A Message for the U.S. Congress

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) was founded in 1990 as a donor funded non-profit with a focus on fighting for internet freedoms. They frequently bring those fights to the courts by bringing lawsuits against large corporations and the government. They also work to provide information to inform legislators and the public at large. The EFF is cool, but of course you don’t have to agree with every position they have ever taken. That said, all in all I have to say I think they are focused on very important principles. In my opinion, their best actions are those where they base their positions on well reasoned technical thought. The letter below is one of these times.

In fact, this may be the most well thought out, well coordinated technical based position they have ever established. In an open letter to the US congress coordinated by EFF’s Parker Higgins and Peter Eckersley, 83 of the Internet’s greatest engineers come together to provide a well reasoned opposition to  SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills.

Thanks EFF.  And thanks for providing your content under the creative commons attribution policy, which makes it so conducive to sharing. That too is nice of you.

This letter is printed below:
From: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa 

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We’re just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the proposed “COICA” copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives of last year’s bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to read last year.

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE seizures program.

Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

The current bills — SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly — also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills aside.

Signed,

  • Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, one of the “fathers of the Internet”, signing as private citizen
  • Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software, and President of the Internet Systems Consortium
  • Tony Li, co-author of BGP (the protocol used to arrange Internet routing); chair of the IRTF’s Routing Research Group; a Cisco Fellow; and architect for many of the systems that have actually been used to build the Internet
  • Steven Bellovin, invented the DNS cache contamination attack; co-authored the first book on Internet security; recipient of the 2007 NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award and member of the DHS Science and Technology Advisory Committee
  • Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards, which we use to do everything on the Web
  • Dave Kristol, co-author, RFCs 2109, 2965 (Web cookies); contributor, RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1)
  • Steve Deering, Ph.D., invented the IP multicast feature of the Internet; lead designer of IPv6 (version 6 of the Internet Protocol)
  • David Ulevitch, David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS, which offers alternative DNS services for enhanced security.
  • Elizabeth Feinler, director of the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International, administered the Internet Name Space from 1970 until 1989 and developed the naming conventions for the internet top level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .com, .org, etc. under contracts to DoD
  • Robert W. Taylor, founded and funded the beginning of the ARPAnet; founded and managed the Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab which designed and built the first networked personal computer (Alto), the Ethernet, the first internet protocol and internet, and desktop publishing
  • Fred Baker, former IETF chair, has written about 50 RFCs and contributed to about 150 more, regarding widely used Internet technology
  • Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist, DKH
  • Esther Dyson, EDventure; founding chairman, ICANN; former chairman, EFF; active investor in many start-ups that support commerce, news and advertising on the Internet; director, Sunlight Foundation
  • Walt Daniels, IBM’s contributor to MIME, the mechanism used to add attachments to emails
  • Nathaniel Borenstein, Chief Scientist, Mimecast; one of the two authors of the MIME protocol, and has worked on many other software systems and protocols, mostly related to e-mail and payments
  • Simon Higgs, designed the role of the stealth DNS server that protects a.root-servers.net; worked on all versions of Draft Postel for creating new TLDs and addressed trademark issues with a complimentary Internet Draft; ran the shared-TLD mailing list back in 1995 which defined the domain name registry/registrar relationship; was a root server operator for the Open Root Server Consortium; founded coupons.com in 1994
  • John Bartas, was the technical lead on the first commercial IP/TCP software for IBM PCs in 1985-1987 at The Wollongong Group. As part of that work, developed the first tunneling RFC, rfc-1088
  • Nathan Eisenberg, Atlas Networks Senior System Administrator; manager of 25K sq. ft. of data centers which provide services to Starbucks, Oracle, and local state
  • Dave Crocker, author of Internet standards including email, DKIM anti-abuse, electronic data interchange and facsimile, developer of CSNet and MCI national email services, former IETF Area Director for network management, DNS and standards, recipient of IEEE Internet Award for contributions to email, and serial entrepreneur
  • Craig Partridge, architect of how email is routed through the Internet; designed the world’s fastest router in the mid 1990s
  • Doug Moeller, Chief Technology Officer at Autonet Mobile
  • John Todd, Lead Designer/Maintainer – Freenum Project (DNS-based, free telephony/chat pointer system), http://freenum.org/
  • Alia Atlas, designed software in a core router (Avici) and has various RFCs around resiliency, MPLS, and ICMP
  • Kelly Kane, shared web hosting network operator
  • Robert Rodgers, distinguished engineer, Juniper Networks
  • Anthony Lauck, helped design and standardize routing protocols and local area network protocols and served on the Internet Architecture Board
  • Ramaswamy Aditya, built various networks and web/mail content and application hosting providers including AS10368 (DNAI) which is now part of AS6079 (RCN); did network engineering and peering for that provider; did network engineering for AS25 (UC Berkeley); currently does network engineering for AS177-179 and others (UMich)
  • Blake Pfankuch, Connecting Point of Greeley, Network Engineer
  • Jon Loeliger, has implemented OSPF, one of the main routing protocols used to determine IP packet delivery; at other companies, has helped design and build the actual computers used to implement core routers or storage delivery systems; at another company, installed network services (T-1 lines and ISP service) into Hotels and Airports across the country
  • Jim Deleskie, internetMCI Sr. Network Engineer, Teleglobe Principal Network Architect
  • David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify
  • Mikki Barry, VP Engineering of InterCon Systems Corp., creators of the first commercial applications software for the Macintosh platform and the first commercial Internet Service Provider in Japan
  • Peter Rubenstein,helped to design and build the AOL backbone network, ATDN.
  • David Farber, distinguished Professor CMU; Principal in development of CSNET, NSFNET, NREN, GIGABIT TESTBED, and the first operational distributed computer system; EFF board member
  • Bradford Chatterjee, Network Engineer, helped design and operate the backbone network for a nationwide ISP serving about 450,000 users
  • Gary E. Miller Network Engineer specializing in eCommerce
  • Jon Callas, worked on a number of Internet security standards including OpenPGP, ZRTP, DKIM, Signed Syslog, SPKI, and others; also participated in other standards for applications and network routing
  • John Kemp, Principal Software Architect, Nokia; helped build the distributed authorization protocol OAuth and its predecessors; former member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group
  • Christian Huitema, worked on building the Internet in France and Europe in the 80’s, and authored many Internet standards related to IPv6, RTP, and SIP; a former member of the Internet Architecture Board
  • Steve Goldstein, Program Officer for International Networking Coordination at the National Science Foundation 1989-2003, initiated several projects that spread Internet and advanced Internet capabilities globally
  • David Newman, 20 years’ experience in performance testing of Internet
    infrastructure; author of three RFCs on measurement techniques (two on firewall performance, one on test traffic contents)
  • Justin Krejci, helped build and run the two biggest and most successful municipal wifi networks located in Minneapolis, MN and Riverside, CA; building and running a new FTTH network in Minneapolis
  • Christopher Liljenstolpe, was the chief architect for AS3561 (at the time about 30% of the Internet backbone by traffic), and AS1221 (Australia’s main Internet infrastructure)
  • Joe Hamelin, co-founder of Seattle Internet Exchange (http://www.seattleix.net) in 1997, and former peering engineer for Amazon in 2001
  • John Adams, operations engineer at Twitter, signing as a private citizen
  • David M. Miller, CTO / Exec VP for DNS Made Easy (IP Anycast Managed Enterprise DNS provider)
  • Seth Breidbart, helped build the Pluribus IMP/TIP for the ARPANET
  • Timothy McGinnis, co-chair of the African Network Information Center Policy Development Working Group, and active in various IETF Working Groups
  • Richard Kulawiec, 30 years designing/operating academic/commercial/ISP systems and networks
  • Larry Stewart, built the Etherphone at Xerox, the first telephone system working over a local area network; designed early e-commerce systems for the Internet at Open Market
  • John Pettitt, Internet commerce pioneer, online since 1983, CEO Free Range Content Inc.; founder/CTO CyberSource & Beyond.com; created online fraud protection software that processes over 2 billion transaction a year
  • Brandon Ross, Chief Network Architect and CEO of Network Utility Force LLC
  • Chris Boyd, runs a green hosting company and supports EFF-Austin as a board member
  • Dr. Richard Clayton, designer of Turnpike, widely used Windows-based Internet access suite; prominent Computer Security researcher at Cambridge University
  • Robert Bonomi, designed, built, and implemented, the Internet presence for a number of large corporations
  • Owen DeLong, member of the ARIN Advisory Council who has spent more than a decade developing better IP addressing policies for the internet in North America and around the world
  • Baudouin Schombe, blog design and content trainer
  • Lyndon Nerenberg, Creator of IMAP Binary extension (RFC 3516)
  • John Gilmore, co-designed BOOTP (RFC 951), which became DHCP, the way you get an IP address when you plug into an Ethernet or get on a WiFi access point; current EFF board member
  • John Bond, Systems Engineer at RIPE NCC maintaining AS25152 (k.root-servers.net.) and AS197000 (f.in-addr-servers.arpa. ,f.ip6-servers.arpa.); signing as a private citizen
  • Stephen Farrell, co-author on about 15 RFCs
  • Samuel Moats, senior systems engineer for the Department of Defense; helps build and defend the networks that deliver data to Defense Department users
  • John Vittal, created the first full email client and the email standards still in use today
  • Ryan Rawdon, built out and maintains the network infrastructure for a rapidly growing company in our country’s bustling advertising industry; was on the technical operations team for one of our country’s largest residential ISPs
  • Brian Haberman, has been involved in the design of IPv6, IGMP/MLD, and NTP within the IETF for nearly 15 years
  • Eric Tykwinski, Network Engineer working for a small ISP based in the Philadelphia region; currently maintains the network as well as the DNS and server infrastructure
  • Noel Chiappa, has been working on the lowest level stuff (the IP protocol level) since 1977; name on the ‘Birth of the Internet’ plaque at Stanford); actively helping to develop new ‘plumbing’ at that level
  • Robert M. Hinden, worked on the gateways in the early Internet, author of many of the core IPv6 specifications, active in the IETF since the first IETF meeting, author of 37 RFCs, and current Internet Society Board of Trustee member
  • Alexander McKenzie, former member of the Network Working Group and participated in the design of the first ARPAnet Host protocols; was the manager of the ARPAnet Network Operation Center that kept the network running in the early 1970s; was a charter member of the International Network Working Group that developed the ideas used in TCP and IP
  • Keith Moore, was on the Internet Engineering Steering Group from 1996-2000, as one of two Area Directors for applications; wrote or co-wrote technical specification RFCs associated with email, WWW, and IPv6 transition
  • Guy Almes, led the connection of universities in Texas to the NSFnet during the late 1980s; served as Chief Engineer of Internet2 in the late 1990s
  • David Mercer, formerly of The River Internet, provided service to more of Arizona than any local or national ISP
  • Paul Timmins, designed and runs the multi-state network of a medium sized telephone and internet company in the Midwest
  • Stephen L. Casner, led the working group that designed the Real-time Transport Protocol that carries the voice signals in VoIP systems
  • Tim Rutherford, DNS and network administrator at C4
  • Mike Alexander, helped implement (on the Michigan Terminal System at the University of Michigan) one of the first EMail systems to be connected to the Internet (and to its predecessors such as Bitnet, Mailnet, and UUCP); helped with the basic work to connect MTS to the Internet; implemented various IP related drivers on early Macintosh systems: one allowed TCP/IP connections over ISDN lines and another made a TCP connection look like a serial port
  • John Klensin, Ph.D., early and ongoing role in the design of Internet applications and coordination and administrative policies
  • L. Jean Camp, former Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, focusing on computer security; eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School; tenured Professor at Indiana Unviersity’s School of Informatics with research addressing security in society.
  • Louis Pouzin, designed and implemented the first computer network using datagrams (CYCLADES), from which TCP/IP was derived
  • Carl Page, helped found eGroups, the biggest social network
    of its day, 14 million users at the point of sale to Yahoo for around $430,000,000, at which point it became Yahoo Groups
  • Phil Lapsley, co-author of the Internet Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), RFC 977, and developer of the NNTP reference implementation
  • Jack Haverty (MSEE, BSEE MIT 1970), Principal Investigator for several DARPA projects including the first Internet development and operation; Corporate Network Architect for BBN; Founding member of the IAB/ICCB; Internet Architect and Corporate Founding Member of W3C for Oracle Corporation
  • Glenn Ricart, Managed the original (FIX) Internet interconnection point
  • Ben Laurie, Apache Software Foundation founder, OpenSSL core team member, security researcher. Over half the secure websites on the Internet are powered by his software.
  • Chris Wellens President & CEO InterWorking Labs

Quickstart Guide: Stand up your cloud-based servers with Rackspace

Rackspace is a growing cloud computing capability provider that differentiates themselves by what they call “Fanatical Support.”  We try not to dwell too long on the marketing slogans of firms but have first-hand experience with Rackspace and can tell you their support is really really different. It must be the culture, but every support experience has left me convinced they are a great company to do business with.

We host several sites at Rackspace, including CTOvision.com  We also host data in Rackspace’s clouds and use their Cloud Files as part of a content delivery system. Additionally we use Rackspace cloud servers for standing up testing and prototyping environments and have also stood up Hadoop analytical clusters in the Rackspace cloud.

We have a coming post on quickly standing up an Apache Hadoop Cluster (CDH3-based) on cloud servers and to prepare you for that step by step tutorial we want to make sure you had a familiarity with Rackspace’s capabilities. To that end, this post will walk you through how to establish your own Cloud Server on Rackspace.

First, a word about cost. If you start small you can give yourself enough power to test the Rackspace cloud for about $11.00 per month. If your day job is as an enterprise techie or leader we recommend doing this with RedHat enterprise (which is probably in use in your organization) and there is a slight licensing fee for that too, so plan on another $20.00 per month there).  Your rates are decided based on how many servers you stand up and how powerful you make the servers. Keep in mind that when you are done building servers you should smartly scale them back. If you are only using a small bit of compute power you should only pay the minimum (that is the beauty of cloud computing).

The standup of a server for this tutorial will only cost you a few bucks, but once you stand up the Hadoop Cluster we tell you about in later posts you can easily run into expensive tasks, depending on the size of the data sets you crunch.

Rackspace cloud servers provide hosting via “virtual private instances.” These give you the ability to deploy, utilize and pay for as little or as many resources as you need. You can have one up and running in about 5 minutes (you can time yourself as you work through the tips below).

Now lets get into it, follow along and you can stand up your Rackspace server in no time at all:

Step one: Create your login:

Step two: Stand up your server:

  • You will now have access to Rackspace’s Cloud Server Control Panel. Login there with the credentials you created in the previous step.
  • Click the button that says “Add Server”  (how is that for intuitive?).
  • You will now see an easy to read list of servers you can select from. There are three tabs at the top, one for Linux, one for Windows, and one for your Server Images.  For now, stick with Linux. Select a Server (your choice).  If you select enterprise Red Hat Linux you will pay a support license fee.  We do that for our images because we want that level of quality support. But if you are just testing things out and building prototypes select another, like Ubuntu.

 

  • You now have an option to give your server a name. Pick something unique and easy to understand, like BobsUbuntu or BobsRedHat (you can change the name you pick later).
  • Also select your initial server size. This is the great part about this. You can start small and scale up anytime you please. So start with the smallest option.
  • You will now be given a password.  This is your ROOT password so treat it with respect.  You must have this, but must protect it.
  • You will now see a window that shows the server is being built. In about a minute the server will be up and you can remotely log into it and operate on it like any other server you own.
  • As soon as your server is built you will get an e-mail with the public IP address of your server and the root password.
Now, how do you connect to this new server?
  • Upon successful connect you will get a console command window and can operate on your box as if it is any of your other servers.
  •  How you connect is a matter of personal choice. I use the old fashioned terminal window and SSH. You can bring one up on most any modern computer. You will use the info you received from Rackspace to connect.
  • The command you enter in your terminal window will looks somethting like:

sudo ssh root@50.56.237.236

You may also see:

The authenticity of host ‘50.56.237.236 (50.56.237.236)’ can’t be established.
RSA key fingerprint is ba:86:9b:de:f5:50:4a:3b:07:b2:ab:03:33:ef:c1:1c.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

  • Type yes then when prompted enter your password. Now you are in!
  • The first command we recommend you enter is one to change your root password. The one created by Rackspace was sent via a clear e-mail and could have been intercepted by bad programs or government agents. So while logged in over SSH type the command psswd and enter.  Now enter a new password, twice.  Save this new password in a safe location.
  • It is also important to update the software packages on your server. If you built yours with RedHat type this command in and hit enter:
sudo yum upgrade

We hope this quickstart guide was of use. We recommend establishing servers like this with Rackspace so you can continue to track this emerging cloud computing capability. We also recommend working through this example so you will be ready to stand up your own Hadoop Cluster.  We will be spelling out how to do that in a coming article.

And to review the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 version of this guide see:
Quickstart Guide: Stand up your cloud-based servers with Amazon Web Services EC2

GSA USASearch Wins 2011 Government Big Data Solutions Award

The Government Big Data Solutions Award was established to highlight innovative solutions and facilitate the exchange of best practices, lessons learned and creative ideas for addressing Big Data challenges. The top five nominees and overall winner was announced at Hadoop World in New York City on November 8 2011.

The Government Big Data Solutions Award Program is coordinated by CTOLabs.com.  The 2011 judging panel included: Doug Cutting, creator of Apache Hadoop and architect at Cloudera, Alan Wade, former CIA and IC CIO, Ryan LaSalle, Director of Accenture Cyber R & D, Ed Granstedt, Senior VP Director of the QinetiQ Strategic Solutions Center and Chris Dorobek, founder, editor and publisher of DorobekInsider.com.

The top five honorees of the Government Big Data Solutions Award are:

  • USA Search: Hosted search services over more than 500 government sites.  Provides search and suggestion services plus analytical tool dashboards.
  • GCE Federal: Cloud-based financial management solutions.
  • PNNL Bioinformatics: Advancing understanding of health, biology, genetics and computing.
  • SherpaSurfing: A cybersecurity solution that analyzes trends, finds malware, and writes alerts.
  • US Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs: Large data set with critically important applications for citizen service and national security.

The winner of the 2011 Government Big Data Solutions Award is the USA Search Program of the US General Services Administration Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies.

Award judges saw the USASearch Program as a great example of solving Big Data problems to improve government agility and provide better service for less. In line with the GSA’s cost-saving “build once, use many times” paradigm, USASearch has provided hosted search services for USA.gov and, through its Affiliate Program, over 500 other government websites. This is done in an incredibly cost-effective way, especially for the agencies involved (which receive these services from GSA for free).

In 2010, USASearch adopted an open architectural model to better exploit shared solutions and open source technology. This model leverages Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH3). The move brought further cost savings and scalable shared search services, which drove up usage. USASearch adopted Hadoop to improve the search results by aggregating and analyzing  information on what users are searching, their success in finding it, the time of the search, the affiliate, the results, and which results users click on, among other trends. To do so across hundreds of affiliates with growing traffic, USASearch considered scaling up or dividing its database systems, but they knew that these solutions would be costly and temporary.  Instead, it turned to  HDFS, Hadoop, and Apache Hive—a big data system that could grow cost effectively and without downtime, be naturally resilient to failures, and sensibly handle backups.

The overhaul of USASearch’s analytics is a dramatic success story. In the space of a few months, USASearch went from having a brittle and hard-to-scale RDBMS-based analytics platform to an agile, scalable Hadoop-based system.  By using a state-of-the-art open source technology, USASearch has created a radically different search service that transforms the customer experience Hadoop’s uses and effects will continue to expand as more data sources and tools are added. Having a government-owned and controlled search service allows provides insight on the needs and concerns of Americans to drive enhancements to other delivery channels. The public has a much improved experience when interacting with the government due to USASearch.

The GSA is to be congratulated for their mission-focused, citizen-centered, open approach to a big data challenge and a resulting solution that improves the experience of a broad swath of users of federal services. On behalf of our judges and the many citizens who use this capability on a daily basis we say thank you, and congratulations on this well deserved recognition.

If You Could Pick One Thing For Congress To Do Regarding CyberSecurity, What Would It Be?

A friend who is a former Representative and a respected advisor of many senior politicians recently asked me for some thoughts on cyber legislation. In general, people ask my thoughts because of time I’ve spent working strategic cyber issues in the Cyber Conflict Studies Association (CCSA) or because of my history at DoD’s Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense (JTF-CND) or perhaps because as a techie and a writer I try to track technological contributions to the issues. People generally don’t ask me to comment on legislation since I really don’t track that closely.

But, over time, I have come to a conclusion on the most important cyber legislation the nation needs and I would like to share that with you.

So here is how I replied to the request from my friend the former representative:

I worry so much about the state of cyber. I worry about our tech, our education system, our procedures, our laws, our military, our economy. But the thing I worry the most about is the continual inaction. And I think that is because of a lack of awareness and a general ignorance of the state of cybersecurity.

So, I’ve become convinced that the most important thing we can do is drive for better metrics on the state of cybersecurity in the nation.

Like Abraham Lincoln said, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.”

So, if there was one thing to put in legislation, it would be coherent breach reporting guidelines. We need this in order to generate data that can drive assessments and awareness and help with fact-based analysis on what to do next.

Everything else is secondary. Get the metrics on breach reporting, and that should hopefully help drive the many other actions required.

For more see:

 

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