Don’t be a Target for Cyber-crime

I’m a relatively new employee at Wind River and continue to learn new things and make new connections every day. As I was driving home from work the other day I was listening to yet another news story regarding the credit card fraud incidents that hit Target and Neiman Marcus at the end of last year.

This national news story was talking about something that our clients make solutions for, and Wind River provides key building blocks to make those solutions better!

Target’s chief financial officer, John Mulligan, described to the Senate Judiciary Committee how records for some 40 million debit and credit cards had been stolen and 70 million customers had personal information taken.

Mulligan said, “We had in place multiple layers of protection, including firewalls, malware detection, intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, and data loss prevention tools. But the unfortunate reality is that we suffered a breach”

Michael Kingston, Neiman Marcus’s chief information officer, said that transactions from almost all of the company’s 85 stores were exposed to malware last year between July and October, potentially affecting 1 million people. However, he said that Neiman Marcus “did not learn that we had an actual problem in our computer system until January 2nd.”

The bottom line: Despite best efforts, Target and Neiman Marcus’s systems were just not smart enough – and don’t think for a minute that they are alone.

Fran Rosch, Vice President at Symantec said, “This is kind of an ongoing war, and the types of threats are changing all the time. Information’s everywhere, it’s in our data centers, it’s in the cloud. It’s in software that sits in the cloud and on our mobile devices. So the threats are exploding, but so are the attack surfaces.”

Cyber-crime is becoming increasingly more complex, and increasingly more frequent. Tools that worked a few years ago can’t keep up with the tools needed for today. Network systems must be able to adapt and upgrade with the ease of software, not hardware.

This story by itself is pretty scary. But knowing that these are the kind of security threats that Wind River clients make solutions for was reassuring. Knowing that Wind River provides key building blocks to make those solutions even better made me realize I actually get to play a part in the solution!

Consider this…Wind River Intelligent Network Platform (INP) brings high-performance deep packet inspection (DPI) flow analysis, DPI for security, and packet acceleration together in one award winning offering to help make network devices faster, smarter, and more secure. Customers have evaluated our best of breed DPI solutions as being up to 70x faster than “roll your own” – using less memory. INP accelerates malware and virus detection, includes industry leading protocol ID, application ID, and metadata middleware framework, and also includes bundled SSL and VPN for increased security.

If you are interested to learn more about our Intelligent Network Platform and are attending RSA in San Francisco this year we hope you will come visit us in the Intel Security Booth (#3203) to see a demonstration of some of the capabilities I mentioned above.

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