Cloud Computing: Big Data-Toting Cyber-Security Posse Forming
February 23, 2012
Armed with $26 million of Warburg Pincus’ money, former McAfee CTO George Kurtz is going to try to stop the rape and pillage of corporate and government IP assets that’s going on.
Warburg, where Kuntz was briefly executive-in-residence, plunked the first round money into his stealth start-up CrowdStrike, which says it’s going to use Big Data technologies to stop the rampant thievery by identifying the perpetrator.
Building higher walls, Kuntz says, is useless. The "economic predators" – who may have already secretly modified key processes and data, and may eventually take down critical infrastructure – will just go get taller ladders…
Attribution, he says, is the key piece missing in all existing security technologies. "Knowing who is after your IP is critical in determining what assets you want to protect and how." That way you can figure out what needs defending first and how to tailor your tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) remembering that you can’t defend it all. "Knowing their capabilities, objectives, and the way they go about executing on them is the missing piece of the puzzle in today’s defensive security technologies. The key to success is raising the adversary’s costs to exceed the value of the data they may be trying to exfiltrate and the only way to accomplish that is by forcing them to change the way they conduct the human-led parts of their intrusions, such as reconnaissance, lateral movement, identification of valuable assets and exfiltration."
In his experience hackers may change their tools but are slow to change their modus operandi.
Kuntz says he has been assembling a "dream team" to achieve CrowdStrike’s purpose of fundamentally changing how organizations implement and manage security in their environment. He’s looking for more "kick ass coders, consultants and experts who like us have been fighting and responding to nation-state targeted intrusions." Get in touch with him at mission@crowdstrike.com.