The Compelling Reason to Buy StegAlyzerRTS

To sell their products, all vendors must discover the most significant need that would cause a customer to buy their product.

In marketing parlance, this is called the compelling reason to buy. I’ll refer to that simply as the CRTB.

Please bear with me for a bit while I build up to the CRTB the real-time steganography detection system developed in Backbone’s Steganography Analysis and Research Center (SARC).

Ever since mankind rose up out of the primordial ooze, there has been crime … and there will always be crime.

One can picture a caveman bashing another caveman over the head with his club to steal a big chunk of Wooly Mammoth for dinner! Yum! So, here we have our first case of assault with a deadly weapon or attempted murder along with theft of a Mammoth carcass, or a piece thereof. Hence, criminal activity emerges.

Now, let’s boogie down the evolutionary path a few million years to the Internet era.

The advent of the Internet has done many great things for mankind. However, it has also facilitated the emergence of an entirely new class of criminal … the cyber criminal. Criminal activity is no longer confined to real space. It has evolved and now takes place in both real space and cyber space.

To keep things simple, let’s define a cyber criminal as anyone who would use a computer to do anything that would be considered a violation of law. Further, for the purposes of this blog, let’s say the cyber criminal is a trusted insider on an enterprise network who is contemplating how to achieve a life of ease … perhaps on a chaise lounge on a beach in the Bahamas sipping colorful, sweet drinks with funny names.

Because practically everything in 21st century depends on computers in some way, shape, form, or fashion, there will never be fewer computers than we have today. Rather, there will continue to be more computers and more computer users.

According to the Internet World Stats web site [1], Internet user growth from 2000 to 2008 was a whopping 342.2% and there are now nearly 1.6 billion, yup … that’s B-I-L-L-I-O-N, Internet users worldwide.

So, now let’s assume the ratio of criminals who used computers for criminal activity remained constant during that period … it could be 1 in 100, 1 in 50, 1 in 10, etc. It doesn’t really matter. The point is the number of cyber criminals grew at the same rate as the general Internet user population—a rate of 342.2% over that period!

More criminals using more computers add up to more cyber crime.

More cyber crime is driving the need for improved network security tools to detect malicious insiders.

As the network security tools used to detect insider behavior, malicious insiders are becoming motivated to find more technically sophisticated ways to conceal their nefarious activities to avoid a visit to, and possibly an extended stay in, the Cross Bar Hotel.

Hence, the stage is set for Google-search savvy users to Google something really clever like “information hiding” which results in nearly 5.8 million links many of which will inevitably lead the user to “steganography” which results in more than 620,000 links when Googled.

Thus, more and more trusted insiders who have gone over to the dark side will use steganography applications that are widely available on Internet web sites and are easy to find, download, install, and use to exfiltrate (that’s a fancy word for “steal”) sensitive information.

If only 1% of the estimated 1.5 billion Internet users were using steganography to steal information, that would be 15 million cyber criminals. So let’s bump it down a notch and say that only .1%, or one-tenth of one percent, are using steganography to steal information … that’s still 1.5 million cyber criminals using steganography. Now let’s assume only 1% of those cyber criminals are trusted insiders. That’s still 15,000 malicious insiders who could steal untold amounts of sensitive information without ever being detected.

Thus, the CRTB StegAlyzerRTS is to detect malicious insiders who download and use steganography applications to steal sensitive information such as Personally Identifiable Information to sell on the Identity Theft Black Market or Intellectual Property that is the Crown Jewels of the company.

But even with such a CRTB, many enterprise networks will continue to go unprotected from the threat of insider use of digital steganography.

So … now, where’s that Sex on the Beach … ahhhh.



[1] Internet World Stats, Usage and Population Statistics, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm