Centaurs and honeynets

http://www.fcw.com/article97281-01-08-07-Print







Centaurs and honeynets
In 2000, the Defense Information Systems Agency quietly launched
Project Centaur, a data-mining and pattern discovery program to
identify attack trends, scopes and methods used against its networks.
Project Centaur, as described by DISA in its 2003 budget documents,
was designed to use those techniques to automatically correlate the
location of sophisticated network attacks, determine the scope and
scale of the intrusions, and coordinate response actions. The project
was also mentioned in DISA's 2004 budget documents, but since then,
DISA has eliminated any description of the project from publicly
available documents.
DISA and the Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations have also
fielded diversion networks called honeynets to keep intruders away
from operational networks, according to a presentation at the 2005
Army Information Technology conference by Col. Carl Hunt, director of
technology and analysis at JTF-GNO. Aside from this briefing, there is
little publicly available information about DOD honeynets. The term
generally refers to a network that makes intruders think they've
successfully penetrated their target.
- Bob Brewin