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Company Founded by Georgia Tech Professor Partners With Defense Agencies to Aid Against Network Intrusions

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National defense agencies will team with Lancope, Inc., a company founded by Georgia Tech Eminent Scholar John Copeland, to beef up security on national sensitive and classified data networks using Lancope's intrusion detection technology, called StealthWatch®.

Atlanta-based Lancope, a member of Georgia Tech's ATDC business incubator, will work with the National Security Agency (NSA) and joint Department of Defense research teams to develop "Therminator" - a system for both government and private deployment to detect incoming and outgoing network attacks and sophisticated denial of service attacks in real-time.

Therminator will integrate the high-speed data flow architecture of Lancope's behavior-based intrusion detection system StealthWatch with NSA's complex data reduction and data visualization technology.

"Therminator will identify sophisticated cyber-war attacks that are launched by renegade or terrorist organizations that cannot be detected using traditional signature-based intrusion detection systems," said Copeland, chair and chief scientist with Lancope, and the technology transfer chair at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Named "Project Therminator," the plan is expected to produce a graphical representation of network traffic that allows information security specialists and network administrators to provide more proactive protection of data. The StealthWatch technology combats hacking exploits and corporate network misuse on enterprise networks by using techniques that show the paths they took by listing equipment used to access networks. It operates at giga-speeds, and provides intelligent alarming, advanced network surveillance and forensic data on network activity.

U.S. Army Major General Dave Bryan, the Commanding Officer of the Joint Task Force for Computer Network Operations, is part of the government team working with Lancope. He said: "We must carefully script our systems to look for the unexpected because they are going to camouflage their malicious activity as otherwise normal activity. Therminator is one very promising approach to this challenge."

Lancope's StealthWatch recently received the Innovation In Infrastructure Award (i3) in the security category from the editors of eWeek Magazine and PC Magazine at Spring NetWorld+Interop 2002 and was named "Most Impressive" by eWeek in 2001.

Copeland holds the John H. Weitnauer, Jr., Technology Transfer Chair at Georgia Tech and is responsible for developing programs to accelerate the transfer of campus-developed technology into areas that benefit the economy. He teaches senior and graduate courses on computerarchitecture, operating systems, and networks, and advises a number of Ph.D. candidate students.

 

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  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Matthew Nagel
  • Created:12/12/2002
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:10/07/2016

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