Cyberstrategics

I received an email a number of days ago from someone who was concerned that another blogger was painting me as “a negative person.”   My impression was that they hoped I would comment in reply.

In thinking how to respond, or if to reply at all, I thought of the irony of the “you are being negative” counter argument in a technical debate and many analogies came to mind.   I will share the following fun filled analogy with you, a short story I will call, Snake Oil and Positive Thinking in the Jungle.

A group of people are making their way across a vast jungle.   The jungle is full of dangerous creatures lurking along the way, behind trees, underneath rocks, and inside dark foliage.   The travelers are weary from their journey and the stress of watching out for all the dangers they have to deal with on a minute-by-minute basis.   There is no escape from the stress of the jungle and their fear of the many creatures who live there.

Our travelers stop at a village along the way and meet a man who says he can solve the problems of travel in the deep jungle.   The man stands on top of a large wagon and asks all the travelers to gather around.  He explains that rubbing their bodies with the oil of a certain powerful (… and very hard to find …) plant (… that only he has, of course, the Jojuba plant …) will create a powerful scent that will repel even the most dangerous creatures of the jungle.  If they purchase a large bottle and apply the oil three times a day, especially after a bath ( … which is hard to find in the jungle anyway!  … ), they can travel free of worry.

Of course you already know where the story is heading, but I want you to complete the analogy because it might surprise you in the end ….

A man appears from his shop and begs the crowd of weary travelers not to listen to the man with the Jojuba oil   He says that the oil does not work and many travelers who have applied the oil end up eaten by tigers or bitten by poisonous insects.   He begs the people to listen to him, for he has seen ( … over and over … ) what happens to people who buy the oil and venture into the jungle, confident they are safe.

The leader of the travelers, full of stress from all the questions and concerns of his flock along the way, tell the concerned man that he should not be so negative.   After all, the leader says, many people have purchased the oil and they have not perished.   In fact, the man says, “you are just being negative because you are stuck home with your wife and children and cannot travel on these long jungle voyages in search of treasure.  Think positive old man!”

Most of the travelers in the crowd do not know which of our village characters to believe.   This is the first journey across the jungle for many of them and both men seem passionate in their words and honorable in their deeds.   The travelers begin to argue back and forth “Hey, you are too negative!  Go back to your home and leave us!  We need something to help us through the deep jungle.  What have you offered us?   A plan.  A free map.  Another idea.  Ha!  What special oil do you have to protect us!?”

There are other travelers who shout out, “Hey, listen to that man!   He knows what he is taking about.  Jojuba oil does not repel the creatures of the jungle.  In fact, it gives travelers a false sense of security along the way.  Folks who use the oil have been known to sing loudly along the way, free of worry!  Be careful!”

Back and forth they argue, but in the end, many in the crowd decide that there is nothing to lose.  Why not buy the Jojuba oil?  After all, it is not that expensive (except for those who lost all there money in the crisis back home, but that is another story … )  and the man selling it is handsome enough with a nice smile.  He  also has a wife and a family and is still alive, so maybe there is hope with Jojuba.  Let’s think positively and buy the oil, apply it as directed, and be on our way!  At least we don’t have to listen to the arguments anymore.

Full of positive thinking, and free from two men arguing, the travelers continue their long journey though the vast and dangerous jungle.  Many actual sing along the way and feel much better with the oil ( ... and it does not smell so bad, actually … ).

Maybe the Jojuba oil will work?  Maybe it will not?   But, it just might work!   So, the travelers buy more just in case it does work because they might not have a chance to buy it along the way!

Anyway, the traveler think to themselves, the older man without the Jojuba oil had a nice map how to get across the jungle and avoid the most dangerous areas.  He gave it to out for free.

So I ask  you, who was smarter, the man who wrote a book on Jojuba, sold vast quanties of Jojuba oil and lives in an impressive house on the finest street in the village, or the man who gave away his map for free and lives is a smaller home quietly by the edge of a lazy river?

Filed under: Complex Event Processing | 1 Comment »

Today I woke up late, around 4:30pm. After catching up on my Internet reading, I decided to go for a swim. I looked out the window of the 17th floor, and it was gloomy with heavy dark clouds approaching, so I wondered to myself if I would be able to swim.

When I arrived by the pool, I was greated by a young Thai man who stood next to me as we looked at the dark sky. He remarked it will rain hard soon, had been cloudy for three days, and the pool water was cool. We stood in silence and surveyed the skies. I walked over and swished my foot in the water. Yes, it was cool but not cold. It began to sprinkle rain. I decided to swim, after all the pool is wet, why be troubled by rain.

My swimming began as normal, and slowly, the rain came. I noticed how the rain drops seemed to bounce off the surface of the pool as they hit the water and laughed to myself how the splashing of water gives the illusion of bouncing rain drops. After a few minutes, the rain stopped and I felt odd, as if a good friend had left me.

Into my swimming, the rain started again, this time more intense than before, and I noticed how beautiful the rain was as it spashed on the surface of the pool. The rain made beautiful splash patterns on the surface and no pattern looked like the other. I was completely amazed by the beauty of the meeting of two waters and thought how I should watch this more carefully.

As I watched the rain bouncing off the surface of the pool, I noticed that the intensity of the rain was always changing and it was never really constant. There were always slight variations in how much rain was falling and that naturally effected the lovely patterns that surrounded.

I wanted to observe this more carefully, and noticed my mind was noisy from all the normal things in our lives. There were thoughts of event processing, and blogging, and unix, and the hotel, and the stress of Thailand, and some small annoyance with two young Arab men talking at the top of their voices at pool side.

I noticed that all these thoughts were keeping me from being fully aware of the beauty of the rain upon the surface of the pool, so I worked to calm these thoughts in my mind and tried to observe the rain patterns more carefully. I swam more and more slowly. The rain intensified greatly and I noticed that when the rain is very heavy, a mist of small water droplets form above the surface of the pool based on the intensity of the rain. Most of the time this extra mist above the water was around 4 or 5 inches tall and it created a new beauty to behold.

As my swimming slowed, I noticed the beautiful patterns underneath the surface looking up at where the rain met the pool water. This caused me to swim even more slowly and I tried to notice every moment, every angle, every pattern, every intensity, every change in my rainy blue water surroundings.

I thought that life is so unfair to all of us, how we rush around, worrying about the past, worrying about ourselves, worrying about appearances, worrying about the future and trying to influence much of our surroundings, in a life of frustration and unrealized dreams. Yet, at this moment, swimming slowly, observing the patterns, the beauty as slowly as possible, I saw a great happiness. This peacefulness, understanding and happiness from swimming and observing the rain and the surface of the pool was pure bliss.

After swimming 1km in this state of observation, I noticed how little we really know about our surroundings, including nature and all the wonders and beauty of it. We swim but we don’t know swimming. We don’t know the water, we don’t know the rain, we don’t know the surface, we don’t comprehend how and why of all the beauty that surrounds us.

Resting at the end of my first 1000 meters, having a bit of cold tasty sports drink, I noticed the intensity of the rain had decreased and, at the same time, saw that the energy of all around me had also decreased. The change in water surface energy was another beauty to behold, and I began to swim again.

Luckily it continued to rain, again more stronger, and I was swimming ever so slowly and watching each stroke, each movement, each ripple, each surface pattern under the surface, at the surface and above the surface, within each cycle of a completed breast stroke.

At the end of my swim, I relaxed with my sports drink and watched the light rain making patterns along the water in the puddles next to the pool, the same water that had created a small current and floated my flip-flops away. Then, I saw what I first observed as random patterns of rain on the surface of the puddles.

After a few moments of keen observation, I noticed that the patterns of rain on the surface of the water were not random at all. What I was observing as random patterns was just my own inability to understand the clouds, the wind, the water and all the delicate physics, science and mathematics that bind all of this beauty into a package I was fortunate to observe.

It was then I saw that what we perceive as random is actually only our lack of consciousness of the small details of life, the very things we miss in our everyday world of running here and there and everywhere. At that moment, I decided to give up my life of bliss and enlightened state of mind and enjoy the dry sauna.

There is so much more to life than what causually meets the eye; but life seems to revolve around such a casual and superficial worldview..

Filed under: Off Topic | 2 Comments »

I remember when I was first introduced to Linux, circa 1993.    There was no Linux marketing.   Linux was simply a great operating system and I could use it as a mail server, a file server, a name server, a web server, a database platform, a development platform, a sniffer, a firewall, and more.   I introduced Linux to Air Combat Command (ACC) in the USAF around the same time (first as a mail server).   Linux, of course, has exploded since then.  No gimmicks.  Nothing but great code and a very robust community.

A year or so earlier, while working on the Internet backbone at SprintLink I was introduced to Mosaic and HTTP by a consultant to the National Science Foundation (NSF).   We thought HTTP and Mosaic was interesting. There was no gimmick marketing.   Slowly folks, everywhere, found it useful to share information using HTTP and there is no need to repeat the success story here today.  Good technologies do not need gimmicks or gimmick marketing.

I recently enjoyed some email back-and-forth with a Japanese colleague who mentioned that the Japanese have a special word or phrase for this; and the Japanese often wonder why many (western) companies rely on gimmicks to market their software.    One gimmick has not even taken root before another gimmick appears by the same company, he lamented.     In fact, when you think about it, much of what we read from software companies, and their marketing announcements, are simply gimmick after gimmick, searching for a market.

Is this gimmick marketing really necessary?   Do marketeers really think the public does not recognize gimmicks?

Everywhere around us there are gimmicks.  For example, when Aleri recently bought Coral8, Streambase announced their gimmicky “amnesty program” for Coral8 customers.    When Amazon Web Services (AWS), cloud computing and software-as-a-service became more popular than “service oriented architecture” TIBCO announced the Silver gimmick for their application integration platform.    Then recently, as Twitter  received more press (I blogged about Twitter and event processing around a year ago, as you may recall), Streambase announces their Twitter gimmick.

So many companies seems to be looking for yet-another-gimmick (YAG) to sell their (soft)wares. Yagga, yagga, yagga

When you think about it, none of the great technologies that we use today required any gimmicks.   We did not need gimmicks to adopt and socially accept email, the Internet, the web, word processors, SQL, Google, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, PERL, PHP, MySQL, Apache,  blogs, forums, and so forth and so on.

Why do people think we need gimmicks?

All of us simply want software that solves a real problem without all the gimmicks.   Email, TCP/IP, FTP, the Internet, the WWW, Excel, Word, SQL, MySQL, Google, Yahoo, Word Press, the cell phone (the iPhone!) we use them everyday without the need for gimmick marketing.  We use them because they work and we tell our friends and family and they use it too, and we adapt and adopt.  Good technology does not need a gimmick.

My Japanese colleague mentioned that the Japanese are really at a loss for the reason why so many (US) companies feel the need to use gimmicks to market and sell their products, especially when many  of the products (like TIBCO’s application integration platform) are so excellent.   One gimmick, two gimmicks; oh, here comes Yet Another Gimmick.

When will they ever learn?   Good software sells without gimmicks, and in fact, using gimmicks lowers the quality and the expectations of the user.   We could all learn a few things from the Japanese.  I know I do, almost everyday.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Coral8, StreamBase, TIBCO | 5 Comments »

It is not common knowledge, but we began discussing the need for a cyber command in the mid-1990s; but it was the Langley Cyber Attack in 1997 that started the momentum toward making a future cyber command a reality.   I don’t want to rehash well-documented historical events in this post.  Instead, I will focus on some commentary.

One of the untold stories of the Langley Cyber Attack is that there were a number of folks in the uniformed military who wanted to launch counter-attacks.  However, I was lucky enough to have the support of the senior leadership at that time and formulated both tactics and strategies I called “The Black Hole Strategy”, which was completely defensive and focused on intelligence gathering, which I will paraphrase below:

• Do not provide any feedback to hackers or attackers.
• Create defenses that minimize any damage.
• Passively upgrade systems under attack so they have room to maneuver (if required).
• Store and archive message and traffic for forensic evidence.

In other words, the strategy was defensive, not offensive.  I believed then, and still believe, that you will learn much more about a cyberspace adversary from defensive measures, for example honeypots, sniffers, and log file  analysis.   My strategy became USAF (and DOD) internal policy (it was briefed to Presidential Commissions, Science Boards, etc.)

Interestingly enough, when web home pages became more popular (toward the late 1990s and early 2000s), we would discuss the implications of an adversary defacing a military-owned public-facing (not internal) web page.   My position was basically “not a big deal”.   We can easily have backups and automated scripts to restore the defaced web page.  In addition, if we are clever, we can learn about the attacker and their methods.

However, my position, which made perfect sense to me (a non-military type of consultant) was not well received by a number of people.    There were many people who said that “well, the enemy will be encouraged if they can deface our sites” - we cannot permit it.    My counter-argument was that if an enemy feels satisfied that they can deface a web page, then we should be happy they are so easily satisfied, because at least they did not kill anyone in the real world.   In addition, I argued, we can use the fact that an enemy believes they have hacked a site to provide them with misinformation, bogus files, links to honeypots, etc.

Today, I do believe that offensive and defensive capabilities are required in a military cyber command.   However, offensive capabilities should be “low keyed” and not aggressively advertised.  The mission must be primarily (1) cyber defense and (2) cyber-adversary intelligence gathering.   I will write more on this mission soon.

Filed under: Cybersecurity, Cyberstrategics, Intrusion Detection, Network Monitoring, Requirements, Threats and Vulnerabilities | No Comments »

As someone who, as a consultant, proposed a Cyber Command for the USAF over a decade ago, it is good to see the DOD moving in that direction with the proposed US Cyber Command.    Cyberspace is a critical operational dimension. I first referred to this in a 1997 MILCOM paper co-authored with Lt. Col. (R) Glenn Watt, Simple Framework for Filtering Queued SMTP Mail (Cyberwar Countermeasures), Tim Bass, Glenn Watt, IEEE MILCOM 1997, 02/11/1997, Monterey, CA, (1997). In the abstract of that paper, we opened,

Pre-information age military battlefields are based on the traditional land, sea, air, and space paradigm. Global internetworking is causal to the creation of a dangerously real 5th Dimension of Warfare - Cyberspace.

One of the most interesting factors of cyberspace operations is that, unlike land, sea, air and space, we create the dimension that we are operating in.   The cyberspace dimension is a bit like laying down the railroad tracks before the train.   The possibilities are endless and exciting.   We create the dimension we are operating in; but the domain is just as real as traditional dimensions.

As one of the early pioneers in this field, I am pleased to see, nearly 12 years later, the US is creating a fully authorized cyber command.  However, I also have some advice for this new command; advice that  I hope might influence the  operational pillars of the new command, more than a decade after we began think along these lines.  I will share my thoughts on this topic in a few posts to come.

Filed under: Cybersecurity, Cyberstrategics, Requirements, Threats and Vulnerabilities, Use Cases | No Comments »

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Cyberstrategics, Detection Theory, False Positives and Negatives, Risk Management, Security Event Management, Simple Event Processing, Threats and Vulnerabilities, Use Cases | No Comments »

As we have seen, one of the best ways to predict global events is by placing the possible event outcomes in the community (marketplace).   Here is a (free) Event Prediction Marketplace where technical folks in a community can  place their virtual  (not cash) bets on technology, science and technology M&A events (or non-events) such as:

• Oracle Acquires TIBCO Software on/before 15 May 2011.
• Oracle Stops MySQL Open Source Development on/before 31 Dec 2010.
• Higgs Boson Particle to be observed at the CERN LHC on/before 31 Dec 2009.
• Space Shuttle Endeavour, mission STS-127, will launch on/before the July 11 launch window.
• Google search market share to be 80.0% or more for on/before 31 Dec 2009.
• Virgin Galactic offers sub-orbital space flights to the general public on/before 30 November 2009
• A magnitude 9.0 or greater earthquake to occur anywhere on/before 31 Dec 2009. )
• WHO publishes cummulative total of 80,000 influenza A (H1N1) cases on/before June 30, 2009.

“Crowdprocessing” — Interesting possibilities?

Filed under: CEP News and Events, Complex Event Processing, Event Cloud, Predictive Business, Use Cases, Virtualization | No Comments »

I think the following is a very good Google Adsense ad by Apama.     I see this ad running on a number of sites:

Stream Processing Engine
Now you can monitor, analyze and act on streaming event data.
www.Progress.com/apama

The ad above is accurate and does not confuse complex event processing with stream processing.

Great job Apama!  Thanks for being honest and accurate.

Filed under: CEP News and Events, Progress Apama | No Comments »