I learned about
TOR, a free software helps you defend against network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security while reading the
Rolling Stone Article about
Jacob Appelbaum and his
TOR evangelism.
TOR is an interesting approach to privacy in this digital age for anyone looking for true anonymity. It was interesting to see even the military uses
TOR.
Now the Pentagon, has launched a new project with the opposite intent, designed to discover malicious behavior on Department of Defense networks. The project is called
CINDER (Cyber INsiDER Threat).
CINDER is to meant to discover potentially malicious actions and behavior on a network. The goal of CINDER will be to increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which insider threats are detected and impede the ability of adversaries to operate undetected within government and military interest networks.
CINDER will monitor actions rather than isolated events such as specific downloads or search. CINDER will track patterns of system usage and actions and compare with normal activity.
CINDER assumes that insiders are operating within the Pentagon's networks, so rather than focus on keeping outside threats out, it will be designed to target those already inside.
It is interesting to see the tools being developed and used by all participants of the perceived cyber war. As politicians. journalists, and other high profile people use
TOR to guarantee their anonymity, high profile network owners are working hard to develop software to keep their information and networks safe.
