News4u-Bureau Report –Amit-LONDON, 19 June, 2010: Detica today outlined its vision for achieving enhanced security, at lower cost, through groundbreaking information innovation. The company proposed a dual focus on exploiting and defending information and suggested looking at innovation in two key areas – sweating far more value from all information that is currently available and, equally, defending this information in the face of exposure to increasingly advanced, sophisticated and asymmetric threats.
Speaking at Farnborough International Air Show today, Tom Burton, of Detica’s Defence Practice said: “We believe that there is a need to exploit our information assets in a new way. We need to apply advanced analytics and take a data driven approach to enable people to make our information work far harder than it has to date. Only by doing this will we be able to meet the contemporary threats at a time of increased pressure on resources. This applies not just in Defence but also across Government and in those businesses that are critical to our Nation’s success and security.”
Detica argued that most organisations and Government departments already have access to enough information and databases and that the real power now lies in converting this into ‘Knowledge’ or ‘Intelligence’; and this requires a new way of looking at the problem which also ensures that data is comprehensively defended.
“You can’t define rigid rules to test for terrorist, criminal or fraudulent activities because the individuals responsible actively test for rules in order to find weaknesses,” Tom Burton said. “The problem is too complex and relying on rules will prevent you from identifying the unknowns, which may be the most important areas to focus on. We need to apply advanced analytics and let the data lead us to the answer, not impose our preconceptions of the likely answer onto the data. By taking this approach from the outset we can prioritise scarce and expensive resources so that they are focused on the areas of highest risk or greatest benefit.”
Tom Burton continued: “This approach can be usefully used in military applications. We are now exploring how to identify significant costs in the support of military capability. If applied to the extensive volumes of supply chain, maintenance, failure and usage data that is collected on platforms, when enriched with other information – such as personnel involved and geographic dispositions – it is possible to identify previously unidentified root-causes of failure that can be used to reduce waste from the support chain and can bring significant cost rewards.
“Without collecting any new data, we have helped the British Army’s personnel function to deliver direct benefits that were some ten times greater than the investment made in improving data governance and exploitation. On financial grounds alone, these returns should be sufficient motivation; when applied to missions where failure has a direct impact on life or national security, then the motivations are arguably overwhelming.”
Detica also called for information intelligence innovation to have an equal focus on the protection and defence of information.
Henry Harrison, Technical Director at Detica said: “There has been an astounding period of innovation in the way we use and depend on information and communications systems – frequently known as “cyberspace”. But our increasing dependence on information and communication systems is something our adversaries have noticed. In the last few years the determination and sophistication of our cyber adversaries has grown to such a degree that it is now clearly recognised as a critical threat to our national security. Our adversaries are innovating at a furious pace and we have to fight innovation with innovation.”
Detica said that in the cyber domain, more often the attack is a covert infiltration from organised criminals, politically-motivated individuals, or even nation states and even if the target detects that they’ve been infiltrated, they almost certainly don’t know by whom. Of particular concern is that the targets for these attacks are not just military – they cover the whole spectrum of organisations including other parts of government and private industry. This could have a profound impact on the economy as IPR and commercially sensitive information is stolen wholesale.
Henry Harrison continued: “Organisations have to accept that they are under siege and that determined attackers – whether criminals, activists or others – will ultimately succeed in penetrating their defences. We are working with some of our customers to put in place operations to catch these ‘cyber spies’ to help them detect infiltrations as early as possible so that they can be expelled before they have had time to identify and steal the most valuable information.
“To find the cyber intrusions, we need to look in the data and let it tell us the answers. In this case, the data we are talking about includes datasets such as log files from firewalls, file servers, web servers and other IT equipment – log files that organisations in many cases already generate and store but do not analyse in any detail.
“What we are seeing is that because historically most organisations haven’t considered themselves to be in business of tracking down covert infiltrators, once the adversaries have managed to find a way in they are in many cases not bothering to be particularly sophisticated in covering their steps.”
Henry Harrison concluded: “Just like other walks of life, there is no such thing as complete security in cyber space. But we can have much better security that we do today. This is not about viruses, this is about targeted attacks using sophisticated tools. We can’t solve the problem by retreating from cyber space – we believe we must and will become more dependent on information rather than less. With the explosion of the Internet over the last 20 years we have innovated our way into this problem – we believe we can innovate our way out again.”
About Detica
Detica specialises in collecting, managing and exploiting information to reveal actionable intelligence. We use this capability to help government and commercial clients reveal intelligence, maintain security and strengthen resilience in today’s complex operating environment. We also use our skills to assist clients with other information-intensive problems such as achieving regulatory compliance and understanding customer behaviour.
Detica is a BAE Systems company.
For further information, please visit www.detica.com.
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