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SitScape: Providing analysts, operators and decision makers with agile Data Visualization and Correlation in a Big Data world

Editor’s note: I am very proud to be on the advisory board of SitScape and would like to share an update on the capabilities of this hot company that is exciting so many people and senior leaders in our community, and is winning over very large government agencies and Fortune 100 global organizations quickly. –bg

SitScape is an enterprise software company headquartered in Tyson’s Corner, Northern Virginia, right outside of Washington D.C. SitScape was founded with a single vision to empower business and mission users to visually access and analyze information that matters to them at-a-glance, and naturally collaborate in their own situational context for effective decision making.

SitScape delivers a powerful Web-based Information Intelligence and Decision Making software system for visual, on-demand situational awareness, real-time contextual collaboration; agile big data correlation and visualization to the Enterprise and Mission/Remote Teams that is secure, flexible and very easy to use.

I am highlighting specifically one key innovative capability of SitScape in this post:

“Agile Big Data Correlation and Visualization without Programming”

This next-generation web-based big data technology empowers non-technical users to rapidly connect, visualize and correlate disparate data sources on-the-fly using just a Web browser, without requiring data being extracted and loaded into a central database or data store first.

With just a few mouse-clicks, user can create beautiful and highly interactive visualizations from data source in their Web browser, those visualizations are automatically linked and correlated by the software. User can click on visualization, slice and dice the data visually, and all the other visualizations on the screen will update accordingly simultaneously. User can also keep drill-down or drill-through from a top level data visualization to various other visualizations dynamically. Then with a few more mouse clicks to apply analyst’s knowledge, it can correlate data from different data sources rapidly. All those can be done in seconds or minutes, leading to rapid fire data exploration and analysis across multiple disparate data visualizations and data sources.

The big differences from competitors/predecessors:

(1) It not only can automatically link and correlate multiple visualizations from shared data store, but also can correlate and link disparate data sets and their visualizations across disparate data sources easily, not forced to export/load those data into a centralized data store or memory first.

(2) It is 100% Web-based for agile interactive exploratory data analytics and visualization, there is no need for desktop software install, and so no need to go through the extra step of publishing the desktop analysis results to another  Web server with only none-real-time data.

(3) It further differentiates from transitional BI technology with its capability of working with real-time operational data collaboratively, and the ability to monitor operational data flow and data changes; and the capability of triggering events and data correlation on-the-fly based on user-defined thresholds or rules for the mission critical operational environment such as cyber. Transitional visualization or BI technologies are mostly focusing on reporting and visualization of historical data.

I believe this technology has huge potential for operational data analysis, intelligence, visualization and collaboration for shared situational awareness (SSA).

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Technology Applicability & Uses

It has broad applicability to the Defense/Security/Intel space as wells as a very broad commercial sectors.

(1) Shared situational awareness for Intel, ISR, Cyber, C4, Security etc.

(2) On-demand situational understanding for Ops team and Sr. Leaders.

(3) Actionable operational intelligence to ISR, Ops and Command Centers, Mission Teams,

(4) Watch Floors, Situational Rooms, Analysts virtual desktop

(5) Dynamic briefing and travel books for DoD and IC Senior Leaders.

Those missions all have similar challenges of too many disparate data sources, frequent changes and constant generation of new data, and being hard to visualize and correlate those data at near real-time basis for shared situational awareness and informed decision making.

I truly believe a technology that can bring rapid value to ever changing variety, velocity and volume of those applications and data sources in a visual and agile way, being 100% browser based, and mobile-enabled is exactly what Defense/Security/Intel/Commercial space has been looking for in our Big-Data Age.

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A sample use-case(s) for the technology

In a typical cyber operational environment, there are many disparate data sources, ranging from network configurations, network traffic, applications and severs configuration information, server logs, user authentication and usage activities, physical building/badge access activities, phone call records, geopolitical data etc.

It is very common to ask questions such as what is the top-N accessed cyber resources, who have been access those, from where, when they did that, in what statistical patterns, and is there any correlation of those activities with other communication records such as phone records and travel/location information.

This may involve a number of disparate data sources and systems, and in many cases, it is not easy to have all the data being per-extracted, batch processed in a central data store first. Actually in many cases, it is impossible to do that due to the operational data is still being updated at near real-time basis.

Further, the situation is highly dynamic. If a new ad-hoc business question comes up during operation such as like to know for the identified time frame of interest for a user, is there any login activities he/she did, or on-going, on another new network. Assume we can have access to the operational  data of this new source, it will be very hard for the operators if they need to wait for custom programing finish first, or need to extract and load this new data source into a centralized data store first.

What we need is a brand new agile way to rapidly plug and play this new live data source into the common Data Correlation Fabric without the need to move data to a central place first. At run-time, the Fabric can dynamically query and visualize this newly plugged in data by leveraging correlated query conditions extracted from the human or machine recognized patterns based on initial data sources’ visualizations on-the-fly. SitScape’s underline innovative and patented technology provides exactly such a data correlation  and linking Fabric that is very powerful yet amazingly is also business-user centric.

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I believe this game-changing technology will drastically improve the agility, flexibility and adaptability of our overall information intelligence and decision making process, makes it more real-time, less coupled, light-weight and highly extensible.

For more on SitScape see http://www.sitscape.com

 

Track the most disruptive technologies by diving into our categorized index:

Artificial Intelligence Companies – A fast overview of Artificial Intelligence companies we believe are poised to cause the most positive disruption in the enterprise.

Big Data Companies – Reference to the greatest, most disruptive Big Data companies in the tech ecosystem.

Business Intelligence Companies – We assess these to be the Business Intelligence Companies most impactful for delivering real decision advantage.

Cybersecurity Companies – We apply our deep expertise in cybersecurity to assessing the best across multiple categories including:

Cloud Computing Companies – We include both platform and software as a service providers, capturing only the most innovative and disruptive.

Collaborative Tool Companies – These are the firms that help humans connect to humans to create, manage and lead.

Infrastructure Companies – Critical enterprise foundations for business agility.

IoT Companies – Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things are here. How do you manage them?

Mobile Companies – Help manage, configure, secure and optimize these very powerful capabilities.

Robotics Companies – Including innovations in Robotic Process Automation, Drones, and industrial robotics.

Services Companies – We only track a few, the ones we really know well.

Tech Titans – These are the big players. We track the tech titans closely since their capabilities change continuously.

VC, PE and Finance Companies – Keeping an eye on the investors can give indications of coming developments.

You can also use our topical pages to get up to speed quickly on the current status of the major megatrends. See our pages on Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Mobility, Big Data, Robotics, Internet of Things, Cybersecurity and Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.

We also provide special pages focused on high interest topics, including Science Fiction, Entertainment, Cyber War, Tech Careers, Training and Education and Tech Tips.

 

NIST Issues Draft Guide To Cyber Threat Information Sharing

I love and respect NIST and I just want to come right out with that so you know where I am coming from. Now add on top of that the fact that they have just issued a draft document that discusses items at the intersection of three of my passions, Cyber Security, Technology and Intelligence, and you can see why I am so excited.  So, with my bias in mind, I report the following:

NIST has just produced a draft special publication that I believe is the best thing I have ever read from their organization. The document is SP 800-150, the Guide to Cyber Threat Information Sharing.

This is a draft released for public comment. Expect changes in the final version. But this is ready for your review right now. If you are a CIO, CISO, CTO or other enterprise IT professional you will learn lessons and gain insights into approaches that can help you enhance your ability to create, acquire, process, share and act on cyber threat intelligence. It is well worth reviewing now, even while it is in draft.

As a draft, comments are being solicited, and I already have a few minor ones I’ll be suggesting for NIST consideration. For example, I do not like the way they bestow credit upon one particular integrator who rushed out and trademarked a term that had been in use in the community for decades. I’m going to work to ensure that is put in a community-focused light. I am going to suggest a tiny bit more information on some key technical standards for information sharing. Although I love the reference to standards on the last page, I’m thinking a paragraph or two on OVAL, SCAP, STIX, TAXII and VERIS could be helpful to enterprise IT professionals.

But those are minor suggestions. Overall I found this to be a fantastic document that I believe can make a positive contribution to enterprise threat information sharing right now.

To read more see: NIST SP 800-150

More reading:

NIST report on IoT security raises awareness on risks of connected devices

CTOvision Guide To The Cybersecurity Technology Marketplace

 

 

SecDef Says World is Exploding All Over: Some thoughts for technologists

We have to assume all our readers, being the savvy connected people you are, are tracking the many concerning global events that appear to be happening with much more frequency. Humanity has a history of violence and some have postulated that what we are seeing now is just do to better coverage of events. Personally I don’t buy that. I believe Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel captured the situation eloquently when he said “The world is exploding all over.” There are hot spots and potentially massive force on force war-starting situations in the South China Sea and East China Sea, North Korea, the Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Gaza. When you consider that the climate is most definitely changing and coming resource shortages can precipitate or escalate conflict things are even more deadly serious for humanity.

In this chaotic world where things are exploding all over, our national security community has been put under even more pressure because of deep insights into our capabilities given to adversaries because of traitorous leaks. This makes it especially hard but also serves as an important reminder that all IT needs to be fielded with end to end security in mind.

Another continuous pressure most enterprise technologists feel is coming from budgets. IT efficiency and ways to optimize spend are incredibly important in and out of government.

Government technologists have been especially stressed with support to global military and intelligence operations in an age of heightened global chaos. That remains true, of course, but there are broader points to make, including the fact that we technologists can help in shaping better outcomes in all these areas. Never has there been a greater need for the input of technologists to national security policy. There is also a need for new innovation to get more done for lower cost and to do so securely. And there is a huge need for innovation in support of national security and climate activities.

This need will continue to shape our reporting at CTOvision. We would also like to ask for your inputs. If you have topics you can shed light on that will help the broader community understand emerging requirements for solutions or if you have solutions that you need to bring to the attention of national security decision-makers please get in touch and consider submitting a guest post to the site.  Posts that are written to serve our readers have a very high chance of being approved for posting.

Related Posts:

Changing Government Requirement For Market Research to Continuous Market Assessment

Thoughts on the Government Shutdown: from a technologist perspective

Enterprise Technologists From Every Sector: Get The Real Truth About NSA From A Trusted Insider

 

The Technology Behind Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Disease Research: An Interview with Simon Lovestone

Simon Lovestone is a professor of translational neuroscience at Oxford University, and a key researcher that has been part of a decade long pursuit of insights into Alzheimer’s. In an 8 July Telegraph piece titled “Alzheimer’s disease could be prevented after new blood test breakthrough” Simon provides key context on research conducted at Oxford and King’s College London which shows that detectable proteins can indicate the disease is imminent. This major step forward in research holds the promise of allowing for earlier treatment of the disease and potentially even a preventive strategy.

The potential benefit of this research is staggering to comprehend. Estimates are up to 44 million people worldwide are living with Alzheimer’s. The impact on them, their families and caregivers and society as a whole are impossible to calculate but clearly far too costly for humanity to tolerate. This makes the research reported here very virtuous and welcomed by a wide swath of people.

The research team published their results in a paper titled “Plasma proteins predict conversation to dementia from prodromal disease” at Science Direct.

We had an opportunity to ask Simon a few questions about his research. Our questions and his responses are below:

Gourley:  It seems your team used a pretty straightforward technology setup for your research. You leveraged the commercially available Luminex 200 xMap Assay instrument, then the Systat software package and SPSS for analysis. The machine learning algorithms of WEKA were used as an aide in classification of data. Does this describe your core technology setup?

Lovestone: Absolutely correct. The only additional point is that previous work, over the past ten years (first publication in 2006 and very many since that document our work) that did the primary discovery suggesting which proteins were associated with either disease or with pathology used a range of technologies including 2DGE and LC-MS/MS and other mass spectrometry approaches including multiplexing with TMTs and MRM methods. We used these as proteomic discovery phases, then did some replications and then finally the ‘near-qualification’ level study we published yesterday using Luminex tech.

Gourley:  These capabilities all come from different providers. Did your team encounter any challenges in moving data from system to system during this analysis? Any lessons learned regarding system interoperability you would like to pass on?

Lovestone: Good question. In the paper we published 8 July then the answer was no. All worked smoothly and the collaboration with Proteome Sciences and Millipore Merck was extremely productive and much valued. There were no inter-operability issues at either a technical or analytical level. However, if you take the last ten years work as a whole (as in the response above) then there are frequent interesting interoperability issues. It isn’t unusual for us to find a potential analyte associated with disease at proteomic level using MS and then not to find the same thing using an antibody capture technology. There can be many reasons for this – statistical error/happnestance/overfitting of data in proteomic phase, a failure of the antibody capture tech (antibody doesn’t ‘work’, other test failure) or what we suspect most often, that the MS measures something ‘different’ to the antibody capture. So the MS measures the analyte at a compound of protein level and post-transaltional modification. The antibody capture actually measures an epitope not a protein. So they measure different things and its not surprising that moving from discovery to validation doesn’t progress smoothly in all cases. However, the failures to progress are less important than the ones that do progress if the goal is a practicable and useable test.

Gourley:  Did you encounter any significant delays in your research due to technology limitations?  (what technology do you wish worked faster?)

Lovestone: It took longer than we wished as we have a very hands-on/manual laboratory as is typical in an academic lab. Also, although multiplexed, the Luminex we used was spread over more than one plate. Running that many Luminex tests on that many individuals and taking suitable care in doing so simply takes a lot of person-hours. However, all the technology is semi-automatable and suitable for robotic liquid handling etc

Gourley: Any recommendations for the technology community on capabilities that can enhance your team’s capabilities?

Lovestone: Buy some robots!

Also – we now need some tech development and we want to put the core analytes on a single multiplexed platform – if Luminex then on a single plate. This would hugely reduce costs and time.

However – looking forward, the thing I am most excited by is the possibility of miniaturisation and automation. I think the possibility is of very high throughput diagnostics for repeated use without centralised laboratories. This is possible…..

Gourley: Thank you very much for the context Simon. And thanks to you and your entire team for the continued pursuit of this critically important research.

Lovestone: My pleasure.

 

Other Resources:

Great Reference Graphic To Keep Your Brain Engaged On All Elements Of Big Data

Sources of cyber intelligence from governments and academia

What The Enterprise IT Professional Needs To Know About Git and GitHub

GitHub is so hot right now I know you have heard of it and you may even have your own account there. But we are finding GitHub to be of use in ways far more than we expected it to be and think it may disrupt (in a good way) many business processes that it was not meant to disrupt. So even if your duties do not require you to use GitHub we suggest you stay up to speed on the functionality of this new system.

Doing that also requires at least a basic understanding of GIT. The two are related. Think of GIT as version control on your computer and GitHub as version control on the web.

What is Git?

Git is a software source code version control system. It records changes to a file (or sets of files) over time so specific versions can be recalled later.  Git is free open source software that runs on most computers. It is designed to be used in a distributed way and can handle large or small projects and serve large or small teams of coders. Git is the most popular implementation of version control in use. It helps you store things in a local repository (call it a “repo”) on your computer.

One of the reason GIT came to dominate the version control field is its branching model and ease of creating, merging and recovering software code files. Developers can create a new branch of code, try out some ideas, decide to keep some ideas (by “committing” them) or discard them or just leave them around till later. GIT supports many different roles on development teams and it does so in ways that reduces error and makes continuous improvement easy.

Since GIT allows for distributed coding, large teams of coders can work together on projects in ways that do not require a single coder to “check out” the code for modification. Instead of checking out the code in a way that no one else can touch it, you clone it. GIT supports many ways for teams to manage this distributed process so chaos is not an issue.

It is very easy to download and learn and run GIT.  To do so, just visit the website at http://git-scm.com/downloads

After you download the right version of GIT, open your command line or terminal window and type “git help -a” for a list of commands.  Type “git help -g” for a list of concept guides.

If you are interested in really learning how GIT and GitHub work, create a user name and tell GIT your email address of choice, and remember those for our discussion below on GitHub and we will link your computer to GitHub. here are two commands to enter:

git config –global user.name “enter a user name”
git config –global user.email “this-is-your@emailaddress.com”

 

You can certainly dive deeper into GIT now, but I’d recommend holding off till you learn more about GitHub so you can see the power of these two systems together.

What is GitHub?

GitHub is a web-based platform designed to support software development projects that use the GIT revision control system. GitHub’s leaders describe it as a “social coding” site.  GitHub can support single programmers/hobbyists to collegial collective teams to very large development efforts. GitHub provides collaborative tools (including wikis, checklists, task management capabilities, feeds, followers, discussion capabilities, pastebin-like sharing) that go far beyond just version control. Although developers are the core users, increasingly GitHub is also being used to manage versions on documents and to share data for analysis. It is also being used to manage creative projects.

When a person creates a GitHub account they also have an ability to add a bio and other features on themselves and to not only store their own project code but to “fork” code from others that have been shared. This copies a repository from one account to the other.  If you make changes to that that you want to share back, you can send a “pull request” and the leader of the project can pull the changes in and evaluate them. They can then be merged back in.  As this is done, GitHub tracks the developers who are making contributions that get accepted. This shows up on their bio page and is a way of helping others assess that developers credibility. The community will see who the contributors are.

GitHub also provides private capabilities, and those private capabilities can be used by broad, distributed teams.

With that as an introduction, if you have not signed up for an account on GitHub yet you should do so now. It is easy.  Just visit http://github.com

Remember to use the same e-mail address you used when configuring GIT on your local system, this will make it easy to connect your local repositories to GitHub.

When you sign up, you can start with the free plan and that is certainly good enough for learning. After signup you will be on a page with some great tutorials.  Read through them. Also click on your screen name in the top right corner of the page.  View your profile and edit it so others can see a bit more about you.

When you want to create a repository, you can either fork someone else’s or you can create one from scratch. Creating one from scratch is pretty easy. Just hit the “create repository” button and fill in the blanks. Select the box that initializes the repo with a “readme” file and the description you put in the description field will be the start of your Readme file.

Now if you want to see the real power of this system, connect it to your local computer.

Do that by going to the terminal window in your local computer and creating a directory for your repo. (type mkdir ~/myrepo and then cd ~/myrepo)

Then in that directory type git init

Then point your repo to the remote repo on GitHub by typing:

git remote add origin https://github.com/yourgithubusername/yourreponame.git

This is just a start to give you a feel for what is going on here. Now you can make changes to your repository on your computers (you can run Git on as many as you like) and manage them all with GitHub.  Although this is designed for coders, you could also do this with other files, creating a distributed (and more manual) version of iCloud or OneDrive or Box for yourself.

Now that you have a feel for this, go back to the website at http://github.com   Look around for friends and interesting projects. Read what others are up to, and dont be afraid to fork interesting projects.  That’s what this is for!

One to start with is the project page of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Find it at https://github.com/ngageoint

There are so many other things to learn and discuss about GitHub. For example, there are plugins for integrated development environments that make it even easier for GitHub to be used by developers.  And their are mobile applications. It really is becoming a platform that other capabilities can be built on and delivered through.

To conclude, there are some things every enterprise technology professional should understand about both GIT and GitHub:

  • GIT is for your computer. GitHub is on the web and enables social coding. They are related but know the difference.
  • GitHub is so very virtuous for developers and for software management that it is making a huge impact in code quality.
  • GitHub is not just for developers. Content creators, analysts and data scientists are also using it. It is about social coding and that will likely always be the focus, but these many other adjacencies can also be transformed by this model.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Analysts, Tools, and Complexity

complexityCTOs and analysts of all stripes know that understanding the problem they are trying to solve should precede selecting analytical tools. Yet this is far more difficult than it seems, particularly as the variety of problems we come across multiply. One of the major stumbling blocks for analysis in particular is terminological fuzziness. We often (wrongly) treat terms like “uncertain,” “difficult,” and “complex” as interchangeable — when, as economist Scott Page points out, the differences between them are instructive. Page has a useful distinction between all of these that can help us match tool to problem. And by going through his schema, I hope to convince you that there may be more possible dimensions to analytics than tools fielded by current market leaders imply.

Say we have a problem that involves trying to find the best solution from a range of alternatives. Are we able to consider each solution simultaneously and rank them? If so, analysis should be simple — with one gigantic caveat. Generally, the problem here is uncertainty about the solutions themselves. We have a state of belief about what to do, but are we sure we correctly understand the nature of the solutions? In this situation, the best thing to do is to gather more information about the problem and potential solutions. Tools that help reveal patterns, connections, and inferences make the choices we face seem much less daunting, particularly when they can ingest and analyze large and/or unstructured data and guide our intuition.  And contrary to Chris Anderson’s famous column, it’s here where computational tools most approximate the traditional idea of the scientific method. We have a defined question, we want to test the potential explanations/solutions, and we use tools to investigate. When we get the information we need, we’re that much closer to making the right choice. We can’t completely eliminate uncertainty about explanations/alternatives, but we can at least reduce it.

What if the problem is too many potential solutions to evaluate at once? Then it becomes a question of difficulty. Here we move more to the algorithmic and artificial intelligence-centric aspect of analytical tools. With a defined problem, problem function to optimize, and set of problem constraints, we search a solution space in a structured manner with algorithms that will find the best solution and prune away ones we don’t want.  When tractable, these problems take the form of things like the classic Knight’s Tour problem solved with divide-and-conquer algorithms. Often we’ll have to rely on problem-specific heuristics to either find a solution (admissible heuristics) or at least find it some of the time (inadmissible heuristic). Many real-world problems outside of computer science textbooks require algorithms that make very little assumptions about the nature of the problem.  These are all usually combinations of random search of the solution space and iterative hill-climbing/improvement towards better solutions.  Some academics within my school (George Mason University) have developed useful tools for deploying these metaheuristic algorithms to solve problems.

Before I continue, I’d like to make the point that both of these formulations of the problem makes one big assumption about the problem: the fitness landscape of potential solutions is fixed. Peaks and valleys don’t really change too much. For example, say the company is uncertain about what market to choose in the first example. It has some some rough ideas to evaluate, and it uses data science tools to gather information on the problem. The decision is made, and then it’s on to the next problem. Or perhaps a government agency is having a difficult time finding the best way to deal with an job shop scheduling problem. It uses Ant Colony Optimization to find an acceptable answer.  Sure, the problem itself may change, requiring either information-gathering or solution search to be redone. But we can find optimal or at least satisfactory solutions for discrete instances of each problem as they come.

The last kind of problem, however, is very different. Here the problem isn’t really that we have a lack of information or that moving through the range of options is very difficult. Consider that every year, you have to organize a family gathering. Different groups of your extended family have varying preferences about where to go. You have to find a destination that satisfies them all. Unfortunately, each previous vacation (and their level of satisfaction with it) influences their preferences in the current planning round. If your cousin Frank didn’t like the last choice, he’ll be that much more likely to dislike your current idea. To make matters worse,  maybe there was something about the last vacation that put Frank and your wife’s sister Paula at loggerheads, souring both on the previous vacation simply because it caused a flare-up. Whether or not you make a good choice is dependent on whether or not you can predict something the family aggregate will like.

There’s so many dimensions to the problem, and what qualifies as a good solution evolves in time. There’s also a high degree of randomness involved — there are obviously qualitative patterns that re-occur in your vacation satisfaction outcome, but sometimes there can be instances where the outcome is a complete surprise. And because each variable in the problem is so highly interconnected, there may be unintended consequences to seemingly benign choices. You have a feeling that there are a couple of key dynamics driving the problem. It could be, for example, that your in-laws and your side of the family have a finite tolerance for how long they interact with each other, and that a  resort/cruise vacation creates a situation that pushes them beyond their maximum tolerance level. You may not be able to increase their tolerance for each other, but you could design a vacation that doesn’t, more often than not, push them past a critical tolerance value. Don’t put them on a cruise ship, maybe give them more free time so they won’t see each other as much. But how would you find that out?

I spend a lot of time on this precisely because this is a kind of problem that standard conceptions of analytic decision tools often neglect. What you really need is a way to experiment on the problem. You could collect a lot of data and discover some interesting patterns that would tell you what kinds of outcomes you want to explain. But what you need is a way to experiment to figure out combinations of variables are causing the patterns and how altering some parameters might change the way the problem evolves. And since there isn’t necessarily a hard dependent variable –> independent variable setup, you have to think about multi causal dynamics and relationships. You could conduct some experiments, but the family fights that might result could leave you sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future.

CTOs and analysts should look more at tools like NetLogo and other lightweight simulation environments that can easily and intuitively demonstrate dynamics of problems. These tools can be calibrated to existing data and validated against the observed patterns (like, for example, the aggregate vacation satisfaction levels). These tools, however, require some programming knowledge and lack the point-and-click usability of data science tools produced by companies like the many we track here at CTOvision (see our special report on analytical tools). What would make a difference, as my GMU colleague David Masad argues, would be modeling tools that could ingest large quantities of data, run algorithms, and automatically generate a model environment and detailed behavior specifications. That way, model behavior would be automatically calibrated to data and decision makers could just play around with model settings and see what happens.

The academic and research communities currently have the tools to deal with complex problems. But while the analyst community has tools to deal with uncertainty and difficulty, integrated and user-friendly tools to deal with complexity are far and few between. The company that produces tools capable of combining all three problem-solving methods — reducing uncertainty with knowledge discovery, finding optimal model behaviors and settings by cutting through difficulty, and allowing decisionmakers to explore and experiment on complexity — could very well produce the analyst community’s killer app.

Reference to Cyber Security “Wake-Up Calls”

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We have previously discussed research and analysis we did for the Cyber Conflict Studies Association on the many “Wake-Up Calls” the nation’s policy makers have declared themselves to have had regarding cyber security. If history is any predictor of the past, we will still be getting these wake-up calls long into the future.

We want to change the future, of course. Doing that will require that we address the problems with Cyber Threat Amnesia our institutions suffer from.

As an aid to changing the future, please review this list of cyber security “wake-up calls” and consider ways we can collectively learn to stop repeating the same mistakes. I would love to get your feedback on this list.

This is not all major events, just those widely reported to be “wake up calls” for the nation.

  • 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.
  • 2012 Sep, In one of the most destructive attacks against computers noted against any company to date, Saudi state-owned ole company ARAMCO had data destroyed on over 3/4 of their companies computers. The NY Times reports this as a “wake up call” and attributes intelligence officials with that assessment.
  • 2012 Sep, Department of Energy issues a report on internal cybersecurity practices. This report by their internal inspector general was reportedly seen as a “wake up call” for the agency’s cyber security group.
  • 2012 Oct, South Carolina Gov Nikki Haley announced a massive hack into state websites. The Gov offered the excuse that these attacks are increasingly common. Reporters suggested this be her “wake up call”. (Nov 2013 update, her political opponents are now using this against her, saying it was a wake up call for them all).
  • 2012 Oct, Secretary of Defense Pannetta issues what he said is a “clarion call” for American’s to “wake up” to the growing cyber threat.
  • 2012 Nov, Former Director of National Intelligence provides “wake up call” warning of a potential 9/11 type attack via cyber.
  • 2013 Jan, New York Times acknowledges hacks into its papers by Chinese sources. This was widely reported as a “wake up call” for security experts in media.
  • 2013 Jan, Twitter was hit by a major hack in what security experts called a “wake up call” for the ecommerce and social media community.
  • 2013 Jan, Attacks on US banks called a “wake up call” for the industry by cyber security professionals.
  • 2013 Feb, Anonymous attacks against Federal Reserve investigated by FBI. Compromise, called a “wake up call” compromised data from the Fed’s Emergency Communications System.
  • 2013 Feb, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee expressed confidence that the hackers recently targeting newspapers and other companies would soon “wake up” Washington on cybersecurity.
  • 2013 Feb, Mandiant releases a report exposing one of China’s Cyber Espionage Groups. This report, widely considered one of the best articulations of the threat, resulted in significant positive awareness on the seriousness of the threat and was widely called a wake up call. We believe this is one of the best pieces of cybersecurity research ever produced by an independent company, and we know it is making positive, virtuous change. We hope this goes a long way to really being the wake up call we all need.
  • 2013 July, Sowden insider attacks declared a “wake-up call” in Bloomberg report.
  • 2013 Nov, Australian newspaper cites Melissa Hathaway stating “We haven’t had our big wake-up call yet and I’m hoping that we’ll address the problems before we have a wake-up call.”

Of course the reason to publish this list is not to make fun of people for using the term “wake up call.”  The reason to publish the list is to get your brain deeper into the game. Maybe there is something you can do to prevent Cyber Threat Amnesia.  Maybe you can suggest action to current community or government or business leaders? Or maybe you can find ways to educate policy makers or Congress or the American public? Or maybe you have other ideas for stopping this madness of forgetting about the threat.

 

 

A Great Engineering School Just Got Event Better: Fred Chang joins SMU, will focus on cyber security

We have just received word that Dr. Fred Chang has joined SMU. This is good news for the students, faculty, research teams and entrepreneurs around SMU. It is also good news strategically for the cyber security community. Fred is one of the heroes in this domain.

Here is more from the press release:

NATIONAL EXPERT TO LEAD BROAD CYBER SECURITY

INITIATIVE AT SMU LYLE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Frederick R. Chang joins SMU as Bobby B. Lyle Endowed Centennial Distinguished Chair

in Cyber Security,computer science professor, Tower Center Senior Fellow

DALLAS (SMU) – Frederick R. Chang, a recognized national expert in cyber security, has joined SMU to develop a multidisciplinary program aimed at tackling the most pressing cyber challenges facing individuals, business and government today.

Chang, whose impressive career includes leadership positions in academia, business, and in government at the National Security Agency, is the new Bobby B. Lyle Endowed Centennial Distinguished Chair in Cyber Security.  The position is made possible by a financial commitment from SMU trustee and longtime benefactor Bobby B. Lyle, for whom SMU’s engineering school is named.

SMU’s first Centennial Distinguished Chair provides a faculty position endowed at $2.5 million, plus start-up funding of $1 million for the first five years to provide immediate support for the position and related research. The establishment of a Centennial endowment is available only to donors during the SMU Centennial commemoration, March 1, 2011, through Dec. 31, 2015.

In addition to holding the Lyle Chair, Chang also will be a professor of computer science in the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering and a senior fellow in the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.  His appointments to positions in both the Lyle School and Dedman College reflect the interdisciplinary approach he believes is key to effective cyber research.

“Economic and national security are bedrock issues for our country,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “Dr. Chang is prepared to take advantage of the University’s commitment to education, research and dialogue to deal with these critical issues, and will bring to the table students and faculty in all disciplines to find solutions.  We are delighted to welcome him to SMU, where our students fully expect to be world changers.”

Chang has aggressive objectives to:

  • Conduct broad programs of research aimed both at creating a science of cyber security and addressing national cyber security priorities.
  • Apply an interdisciplinary approach to challenging problems, incorporating elements from disciplines not traditionally associated with cyber security such as law, business and the social sciences.
  • Help close the skills gap in cyber security by educating and tapping the innovation capabilities of SMU students to meet the demand for trained cyber professionals.

“Prof. Chang arrives at SMU Lyle at an important moment,” said Lyle School Dean Marc Christensen. “The impact of cyber crime and cyber terrorism cannot be overstated. As Prof. Chang joins SMU Lyle to lead our already strong cyber security researchers, he is poised to make a notable difference in this arena.  We will be educating a generation of SMU graduates who understand the complexities of cyber-related issues whether their degree is in computer science or philosophy.  These students will be better suited to live, work, and play in the modern interconnected world.”

Chang served as the director of research at the National Security Agency (NSA)in 2005-2006, where he was awarded the NSA Director’s Distinguished Service Medal.  In addition, he has held several senior executive positions at SBC Communications, prestigious positions at both the University Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at San Antonio, and was most recently president and chief operating officer of 21CT Inc., an advanced intelligence analytics solutions company in Austin.  Find more about Chang’s background here.

“Dr. Chang’s experience at the highest levels of government, industry, and academia has given him a unique perspective on the cyber security landscape,” said Paul Ludden, SMU provost and vice president for academic affairs.   “He has influenced the national dialogue and policies on cyber security through his work at the NSA, his testimony before congressional committees, and his presence on academic and industrial advisory boards as well as his peer journal editorial board work.  He will continue that influence at SMU.”

Joining the Lyle School puts Chang in the company of faculty already making their mark in innovative teaching and research.  The Lyle School is home to the Caruth Institute for Engineering and Education, the Hunter and Stephanie Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity and the Hart Center for Engineering Leadership, as well as STEM outreach programs such as Visioneering and the Infinity Project.  The engineering school also is a partner in the annual production of TEDxSMU and TEDxKids @SMU, where Chang will be a featured speaker in October.

“Dr. Chang is committed to teaching excellence, and I am delighted he is coming to SMU, “ said Bobby Lyle.  “Research will be significant under his leadership, but he also intends to teach courses that make information about cyber science and security accessible to students of all disciplines.  That’s a tremendous gift, as understanding the rules in cyberspace becomes more important in our daily lives. “

The founder of Lyco Energy Corporation in 1981, Lyle has been a leader in theoil and natural gas industry for more than 30 years, exploring throughout the United States. After selling Lyco Energy in 2005, he established Lyco Holdings Incorporated, a private investment firm.

Lyle graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a degree in mechanical engineering, received a graduate degree in engineering administration from SMU and earned a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He served as a professor and administrator in what is now the Edwin L. Cox School of Business, ultimately serving as dean ad interim and executive dean.

On Oct. 17, 2008, the SMU community celebrated the naming of the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering and evidence of his philanthropy may be seen throughout SMU. Lyle has cumulative service of more than 25 years as an SMU trustee and is a member of the executive boards of both the Lyle School of Engineering and the Cox School of Business.   Lyle is vice chair of the MaguireEnergy Institute and vice chair of the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility.

Chang says he enjoys the sense of working toward something bigger than himself – a philosophy that carries over from his tenure at the NSA, and that he intends to share with SMU students. “There are some very difficult problems that the nation faces in cyber security,” Chang said. “Adding to the enduring problems are new, emerging challenges. I am confident that SMU, working with different partners, can make a difference at the national level.

“My particular area of expertise is in information assurance – defending and protecting critical systems,” he said. “In that context, I’m looking forward to working with my colleagues at SMU and beyond on a wide range of topics such as software assurance, social sciences and security, insider threat and hardware security.”

Chang said he sees outstanding interdisciplinary cyber security research taking place within the Lyle School’s Computer Science and Engineering Department today, such as the work that faculty members Suku Nair, Mitch Thornton and Tyler Moore are doing in network security, formal methods, and economics and security.  “What is required today is cyber security research that incorporates innovative thinking with consideration of people, processes and technology,” Chang said.

He said he is eager to work with colleagues across the campus, including law and business faculty, as well as to use the resources of the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility in addition to those of the Tower Center.

“It is an honor and a privilege for me to have the opportunity to join SMU at this crucial time in the evolution of cyber security,” Chang said.  “From the Lyle School of Engineering, to the Tower Center for Political Studies and across campus, I feel a tremendous sense of chemistry and collegiality here.  There is also a sense of urgency, purpose and mission that is especially appealing.  To be part of this is tremendously exciting to me.”

###

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools.

SMU’s Bobby Lyle School of Engineering, founded in 1925, is one of the oldest engineering schools in the Southwest. The school offers eight undergraduate and 29 graduate programs, including masters and doctoral degrees.

More reading:

The Use of Recorded Future for Cyber Security Professionals

The Mobile Internet: You won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is

The Late Henrietta Lacks: A legacy that has touched you and your loved ones in ways that may surprise you

DNSSEC: An interview with Joe Klein on why DNSSEC matters, how it works, and how you can use it

How Can We Retain The Jedi Masters Of Federal IT In Government Service? Yodas Require Big Missions To Serve

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: building a business when there are no easy answers

 

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