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GCN Home > 09/24/07 issue

Greg Oslan | The new war machine

GCN Interview with Greg Oslan, chief executive officer and president at Narus

By William Jackson

How close are we to cyberwarfare? Pretty close, said Greg Oslan, chief executive officer and president at Narus, a provider of traffic analysis software for carrier networks. The company helps large IP networks see, analyze and manage traffic from a growing number of dynamic applications. Knowing what traffic is on a network and understanding it is essential to providing adequate security because security cannot be achieved today at the endpoint, he said. Not surprisingly, Oslan has a front-row view of malicious traffic passing through the Internet and efforts to ward off full-scale warfare via the network.

GCN: What constitutes cyberwarfare?

OSLAN: This is my opinion only, but I think that what would constitute an act of war over the Internet would be something that maliciously, directly cripples a country’s ability to function. If somebody brought down our electrical infrastructure and crippled our economy, I think that would be an act of war. How we could treat that, government to government, is a policy question. You are not using guns and bullets anymore. What is the appropriate response as your armies move from physical entities to virtual entities?

GCN: What can you tell us about what you saw of the Estonia attacks?

OSLAN: It was the volume and coordination of the attacks that distinguished them. It wasn’t just one computer or one Web site that was targeted; this was spread across the entire country from the libraries to government institutions. We have information in this country of other countries trying to gain access to our machines. It’s kind of a new Cold War. In the 1950s and ’60s, [the Soviets] would send fighters into the Alaskan airspace and see how fast we’d respond — and of course, we’d do the same. The same thing is now occurring on the Internet. One country says, “How many different sites can I break into in the U.S.?” And then the United States responds, and they want to know how quickly we fill those holes.

GCN: What is the likelihood of a cyberwarfare attack against us that goes beyond that tit-for-tat push against the edges?

OSLAN: The bigger global issue is [that information technology] as a service medium rather than as a transport medium is in its infancy so far as being understood on a global scale. People are protecting their small pieces, but there are no stand-alone pieces. They are all connected to everything else in the world. Having a firewall is not good enough, or having an intrusion-detection system is not good enough. Having both is not good enough. Systems that manage and protect on a more holistic scale are what are going to be required.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, IT Security, Web Strategies



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