"Information Warfare"

Sat Mar 6 09:46:33 UTC 2004

On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, John Bishop wrote:

> 
> Since it has the potential to make everyone's jobs here more interesting, I
> thought I'd bring it up and get everyone's opinion.  This company claims to be
> developing a "security solution" that claims to "fight back" against attackers.
> 
> I'm sure I'm not the only one here who thinks this is a tremendously bad idea.
> 
> I'll let you guys tear it apart; take a look at their "white paper" and press
> release, both of which are dripping with enough war analogies and corporate
> bizspeak to make any self-respecting techie cringe.
> 
> http://symbiot.com/

Read through it. Its almost as if it was written by our current president's
staff - a lot of analagies come to me like SDI/starwars, 'protect your 
soil on foreign land' and 'strike back before they do' (without of course 
any serious proof that they are doing anything). And through it all you 
find absolutly know exact details on what they are planning to do and why.

But to be perfectly honest after I saw that some of the press-release people 
were from Network Solutions (their "information warfare" specialist - wouldn't
that be more proper to say about NSI/Verisign's marketing staff or their
lawyers :), I'm not certain if this is just a big hupla to market itself
and make big money on things you probably dont need and that are not 
effective or if it is really serious threat to stability of the net
(from NSI you can expect either way...). 

But its only 30 days before they promise to provide details, so its fine 
by me to wait until they do and for now treat current info as just self-
marketing that should be ignored until we know what they are going to offer.

Here is a quote from their press-release I especially like:
... "Symbiot has introduced the first and only tool that intelligently and 
accurately responds to hostile attacks against enterprise networks", said
Richard Forno, former chief security officer for Network Solutions, and a 
noted information warfare specialist. "While other companies offer only 
passive defense barriers, Symbiot provides the equivalent of an active
missile defense system" ...

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net