Cybersecurity: Here’s What Really Worries the Pentagon

The article and its nested link http://www.progressivefix.com/spooks-in-the-machine-how-the-... recognize the "Sisyphean task" of trying to secure networks. No matter how hard you work at designing a good network, your inside users will somehow screw it up. "'With seven million systems in the DoD, think how many idiots there are bound to be,' one Pentagon cybersecurity official says."

Some security experts believe they can create the perfect firewall around an enterprise or government. It's not foolproof -- the firewall will either become vulnerable at some time or insiders will compromise security measures through idiocy or subterfuge.

After implementing preliminary security measures, e.g., firewalls, the best step any infrastructure maintainer should next do is to record and archive the massive flow of data through the network, computers, server programs, and applications in any enterprise. While one can't realistically capture all network traffic or every disk write/read, one can capture the "fingerprints" of many of these activities, at hardware-, server/application-, and at end-user levels, including for physical security devices. Once this information is stored and made queryable, an enterprise can pick apart and analyze their information flows and find vulnerabilities, learn to patch them, and find evidence of past misdeeds similar to newly discovered threats. Only with years of queryable archives of 200GB+ daily of log data can enterprises really take this step.

SenSage (http://www.sensage.com) realized this and in the early naughties developed the SenSage log data warehouse. The NSA, IRS, U.S. Navy, U.S. Treasury Department, and many health care informatics companies and commercial enterprises use SenSage for this purpose. Check out the "Government" and other sections at http://www.sensage.com/customers.

from article: "Finally, the NSA has a rich history of monitoring the communications of Americans – sometimes legally, sometimes not."

re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT&T