Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Neal Creighton, CEO of CounterTack (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That actually brings me to the open opportunity question. This is more about going up to the 30,000 foot level of what’s happening in the industry. Do vendors who sell to multiple international authorities have the technology available to them if you were to share data with them to be able to trace it back to the actual criminals and take action?

Neal Creighton: Our technology is very automated in how we design it. We don’t like to have a lot of people doing manual inputs into it. However, the kind of work that you’re talking about really does require some forensics investigation over time. Many nation states have people working in this area to figure out attribution. A lot of times, we can figure those things out. The difficulty is however lies in how we respond. I think we’re all struggling with it.

Sramana Mitra: But it’s not up to you to respond. This gets into criminal law and order territory. It’s not up to private companies or citizens to respond to criminal behaviors. That is for governments and law authorities to act on it.

Neal Creighton: I wasn’t saying that we would respond. We provide data. My point was how do governments respond. I think it’s a difficult thing especially when it comes from a nation state. You can have sanctions. You can have discussions like we’re having with China. It’s a new world. A lot of our laws and the way we interact or design deal with physical threat. It’s much easier to do a cyber attack and shut down the ATM networks in South Korea than it is to launch an artillery shell.

I guess my point is we have very sophisticated folks in our national intelligence that we can figure out a lot of attribution with the data that we’re receiving. The difficult part is how you respond. Sometimes, it’s nation states. Sometimes, it’s a hacktivist group. Hacktivist groups are widely dispersed between different countries. We’ve certainly arrested people in the United States. You get into the criminal element which is very sophisticated. We think about the mafia in the United States and how long to get that under control. I’m not saying we have it completely under control.

When you spread the net out into the international arena and the ability to do attacks with a lot of anonymity, it becomes much more difficult to get that under control even with people cooperating. It’s a complex problem. We’re just learning on how to best deal with this. We need a lot of development here. My answer is a little bit nebulous. All I can say is from our point of view, we’re trying to stop them and also, we can provide data that other people can use to try and do other things around attribution.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for taking the time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Neal Creighton, CEO of CounterTack
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