
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a Binding Operational Directive that mandated U.S. The involvement of Kaspersky Lab may raise some eyebrows after a tumultuous period between the vendor and the U.S.
Datathief tool trial#
He is scheduled to go to trial in June and face charges for 20 counts of unauthorized and willful retention of national defense information - each count could result in up to 10 years in prison. We contacted Kaspersky Lab for comment on the report, and a company spokesperson said, "Kaspersky Lab does not have a comment at this time." Those messages arrived 30 minutes before the Shadow Brokers group - an anonymous group suspected to be connected to Russian intelligence - posted a cache of classified NSA hacking tools online and said it would sell more of the NSA's tools that it stole from the Equation Group for $1 million in bitcoin.ĭue to the timing, Politico said, Kaspersky Lab reportedly suspected that Martin was connected to the Shadow Brokers and thus alerted the NSA of its findings and suggested the agency investigate him for the theft of the NSA hacking tools. The first two messages reportedly asked for a meeting with Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky within three weeks. The five direct messages from the account were sent to two researchers at the security company, which Politico said it was able to see thanks to the anonymous sources who alerted it to Kaspersky Lab's involvement. government due to suspected ties to the Russian government, reportedly received Twitter messages from an anonymous account - "HAL999999999" - connected with Martin. Karma is a fickle lover and it was only a matter of months after this that the tech bubble burst and with it my cloak of arrogance.Kaspersky Lab, which has been banned by the U.S. And because network security consisted only of user name & password, even if you did know there was data theft, proving who stole your IP was near impossible. If you didn’t see the employee wheeling out stacks of data in a wheelbarrow you may never have known there was a theft. Back in those days we had no monitoring capabilities. What I didn’t copy over to an external hard drive that dangled from its ribbon cable on the side of the server like a broken pendulum on a grandfather clock, I printed off in reams of paper.Īll this, of course, was before we had tools like Citrix Analytics, which applies machine learning to data that spans network traffic, users, files, and endpoints to identify and act on malicious user behavior and app performance anomalies. For those, I had to access the S:\ drive - again mapped through my own batch files. These included account names, decision maker contact, current and future budgeted training needs and everything short of the custom training guides (intellectual property). Thinking I would make a big splash in my new job, I decided to take a few bits and bytes from my “old” company. I had just accepted a job at the main competitor for 30% more salary and added days out of the class to prep new materials. After all, I was the one who had setup the infrastructure in the first place.

I had a shared account on the CRM application (on-prem) and the common mapped drive that was setup through a complex logon script. Everyone wanted me, or someone like me.īeing a senior person (at the ripe old age of 28), I had access to all the servers and network shares that the business ran on. I had never been very popular in high school, but I suddenly felt like the kid at prom who snuck in a bottle of Southern Comfort he stole from his Dad’s basement bar. In no time at all, the training landscape became crowded with competing “certification factories”, all grabbing for the same customers and instructors alike. Every Friday afternoon the receptionist desk was converted into an open bar with catered food and employees who lost all inhibitions.Īnd for trainers with technical certifications in Microsoft, Novell, and Citrix it felt like the sky was the limit. Seemingly overnight we had gone from one employee with no office to fifty with three locations and over twenty classrooms going night and day.

At the climax of the tech craze we had grown in size, both in terms of sales and employees beyond our wildest dreams. I was running Technical Training for a mid-size computer training company based in Boston. It was early 2000 something and the dot-com bubble was bursting right before my eyes, sending the hopes, dreams and fortunes of the young and old tech wannabe spiraling down into an abyss of bankruptcy. My story, like many others, is rooted in a basic human instinct for survival and inherent greed. Monitoring User Behavior Anomalies with Citrix Analytics
