Network Ice to put the freeze on hackers

SAN MATEO, CALIF. - Network Associates will soon have some new competition for intrusion-detection business. Three engineers who left the software giant last year founded a new company, Network Ice Corp., with a fresh take on intrusion detection.

The Network Ice founders, Greg Gilliom, Robert Graham and Clinton Lum, will unveil their intrusion-detection wares at the NetWorld+Interop conference next month. Their antihacker product suite is designed to protect Windows desktops and corporate servers from intruders attacking from outside the firewall or from within the corporate LAN.

"We can stop them cold," claims Gilliom, president and CEO of Network Ice.

The Network Ice software runs on all varieties of Win-dows and Unix machines and is designed to detect the first signs of a hacker intrusion, such as someone trying to run port scans or using the Back Orifice Trojan horse. Created by hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow, Back Orifice lets a hacker take complete control of a Windows-based desktop.

Network Ice's software cuts off the intruder's IP address when the software senses trouble. But just blocking the same address for hours isn't a complete answer because IP addresses are often dynamically assigned by the ISP, Gilliom points out. Instead, the Network Ice software will later re-enable the IP address, still watching for trouble.

Gilliom says his company's intrusion-detection software will be at least as fast as competing products, such as those from Internet Security Systems or Network Associates.

"We can do 600,000 frames per second of analysis; we can do 100% load on an Ethernet line," he says.

The Network Ice software is designed not to respond at all to inappropriate inquiries, such as operating systems fingerprinting because these responses offer clues as to what operating system or services are running.

The three Network Ice founders, who fashion themselves as nerds building the next big thing, together bring an impressive level of security expertise to their start-up.

Gilliom was chief technology officer at Network General, which merged with McAfee Associates to form Network Associates. His partners, Graham and Lum, were engineers at Network General. o