Resiliency Testing Critical to U.S. Cyber Infrastructure
UPDATE: Be sure to register for our Cyber Security webcast on Septmber 17, 2009.
It appears that talk about the United State’s plans for beefing up our country’s cyber infrastructure is finally turning into action with new details emerging about government plans to create U.S. Cyber Command. Just this week, Defense Secretary Gates approved the creation of U.S. Cyber Command (or "Cybercom). Jaikumar Vijayan wrote the story for Computerworld and explained:
The proposal to create the new command has been expected for some time and is part of an effort to address growing threats to Defense Department and Pentagon networks from foreign and domestic threats.
Those of you in security research have seen much of this coming. The threats have always been out there, but they are now becoming more sophisticated and more frequent. Security attackers are also becoming more creative. Witness the DDoS attack orchestrated by Iranian protesters via social networks this month.
In the testing world we understand that no matter the initiative or the person heading it up, there are going to be challenges for the government agencies, contractors and research organizations tasked with implementing and ensuring the resiliency of mission-critical networks, as well as the devices and the services they deliver.
"Resiliency" is a word that perfectly describes what people are looking to test when it comes to U.S. cyber infrastructure. Resiliency encapsulates both security and performance of the network and the devices that serve as it's infrastructure. If you want to test the resiliency of a device, you have to do it with real-world network scenarios and network simulations. All of this sounds familar to anyone who has been reading this blog since BreakingPoint excels at testing with realistic app traffic, security strikes, line-rate throughput and more.
This morning we put out news around our capabilities in resiliency testing, "BreakingPoint Provides the Only Realistic Network Simulation for Testing Vulnerability and Resiliency of U.S. Cyber Infrastructure". I wanted to share with you a quote from the news release from Des Wilson, BreakingPoint's CEO, where he defines resiliency testing and its importance:
“Resiliency testing is clearly critical to identifying and eliminating threats to the security and performance of our nation’s cyber infrastructure. And the definition of resiliency testing remains simple; test the network and network devices using blended application traffic mixed with live security strikes at line-rate speeds originating from the same address space. However, until today, the government agencies and organizations tasked to optimize and defend the cyber infrastructure did not have these capabilities. BreakingPoint Elite is the only testing tool architected to simulate the conditions of an actual network, providing the resiliency testing capabilities that help make it the only effective defense against net-centric threats and performance issues.”
How do you define resiliency testing?