The Threat Landscape
Cyber attackers have the advantage today because networks are static and the attackers can lie in wait, gather intelligence, and attack or exploit on their own terms. Current network defenses are largely reactive in that they rely on responding to known and anticipated threats and hostile sources rather than being designed to proactively eliminate an entire category of threats.
The President’s 2009 Cyberspace Policy Review has called for identifying “Moving Target” technologies to make networks more proactive, increasing the cost for the cyber attacker, reducing their effectiveness, and giving the defender more time to respond. Network masking addresses all these requirements.
In a September 2010 article in the Foreign Affairs Journal, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn stated “In cyberspace, the offense has the upper hand…the U.S. government's ability to defend its networks always lags behind its adversaries' ability to exploit U.S. networks' weaknesses. Adept programmers will find vulnerabilities and overcome security measures put in place to prevent intrusions.” Network masking provides an effective camouflage to make networks a harder target to exploit.
Masking Networks understands the hacker landscape and the methods attackers use to intrude and then identify and exploit sensitive information or compromise critical systems. Our solutions not only focus on hindering unauthorized entry but also on preventing exploitation or damage by illicit network mapping, traffic analysis, device targeting attacks, and device spoofing attacks. This is consistent with the Pentagon’s Cyberstrategy challenge “…to make the defenses effective enough to deny an adversary the benefit of an attack despite the strength of offensive tools in cyberspace.”
We call this approach “network masking”.