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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector- VIDIUS: Just another Israeli intelligence-born high-tech "security" company that's now weaselling its way into one US corporate/government computer network after another, under the guise of fighting (of course) "child pornography" and (top selling point!) "terrorism." Ten years from now, we'll all be wondering how Mossad managed to obtain certain top secret classified data from the Pentagon. Not to mention taking advantage of opportunities for identity theft and money laundering ....
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Privacy Digest
Feb 21, 2001
LA Times - New Technologies Target Swapping of Bootlegged Files
"...the new security tools are double-edged swords."
"Although Vidius and IpArchive say they are interested only in pirated entertainment and software, in theory the same technologies could be used on any large data file ...
"Robert Ellis Smith, editor of Privacy Journal, a monthly newsletter that explores contemporary threats to privacy, said the anti-piracy technologies are just one element in a wave of efforts to track consumers' behavior on the Web. But he gives Vidius and IpArchive credit for being overt and direct when enforcing copyrights by cutting off a download."
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http://www.larta.org/LAVOX/ArticleLinks/10-15_techterrorism.htm
The Emerging Front
Southern California may emerge as an important center for the unfolding national mission. With this issue of LA VOX, larta begins profiling regional companies involved in various "mission-critical" areas. Between aiding disaster and recovery operations and tracking heavily encrypted and dangerous communication over networks, these two larta poster children are typical of a new breed of company, born in the throes of "defense conversion" and suddenly more relevant to national security again.
North Hollywood [and Israel]-based Vidius has kept busy assisting the the RIAA with its efforts to trace swapping of copyrighted songs. Vidius' network security technology tracks the sharing of licensed material over decentralized, peer to peer networks like Gnutella and Fastrack, (unlike Napster which is a centralized, server-based system). Vidius' technology was primarily developed for detecting and penetrating heavily encrypted files that would normally provide a cloak of anonymity to the participants, thus helping the recording industry stay on top of the increasingly dispersed and sophisticated means of file sharing as they unfold.
Vidius' interest in law enforcement applications began recently when the company established contact with the FBI earlier this year, proposing the use of their technology to track the distribution and sales of child pornography over networks. During a meeting last May with congressional members in Los Angeles, the company also indicated that these channels were being utilized by terrorist networks and that the technology could serve to track that activity. After September 11, company CEO Derek Broes says, "it just became obvious that it was necessary."
"Law enforcement has been using steganography and encryption technology for years," says Broes. (steganography allows for the hiding of data within graphic files.) The new challenge is the widespread use of peer-to-peer networks and the ease with which information gets transferred. Peer-to-peer networks, based as they are on "open source" standards, are ubiquitous and easily assembled. And while mass distribution networks are designed for widespread trading of, say, music files, he adds, " it's not that difficult for someone within the open source community or someone that has an engineering background to develop their own peer to peer network that is only distributed to select people." While each such network has different motives, given the distribution and the customization and selectivity associated with them, a special group like terrorists could easily adopt and operate through the cracks. The challenge, Broes adds, it to monitor and track the activity, its frequency and how information is being transferred.
"You have to keep in mind that these terrorist groups are not just guys in robes out in the desert. They are incredibly sophisticated and the ones that are residing here are utilizing stentography. So even when you do find the information you don't necessarily know whether it's good or bad. It might appear as a picture of Mickey Mouse but that picture might contain information."
Vidius' own history bears mention. The company started as a "defense conversion" offshoot of military research in Israel. It found its calling within the entertainment industry's own urgent need to get ahead of fast-moving technology enabled by the Internet, in order to protect its own considerable assets.
Broes thought it somewhat ironic that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld echoed a line out of their business plan when being questioned by the press about the effectiveness of the bombings in Afghanistan. There is "no silver bullet, no single thing that's going to win this effort for the coalition," Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld's frequently cited comment is exactly, Broes says, how Vidius describes the problem with tracking hidden information over mass distribution, peer to peer, networks--because of their decentralization, there's no silver bullet that can fix the problem.
"Tracking (involves) basically listening to protocols and sitting at strategic points in the world, and listening for specific languages, and that's obviously a far more complicated process," says Broes. "We're at the very beginning stages…of finding out new ways to locate these rogue protocol networks and being able to monitor them. It's not a process that we are going to solve by Vidius popping in and saying, 'we're here to save the day.' It evolves on a weekly basis and will require far more than just Vidius."
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Prepared Witness Testimony:
Ensuring Content Protection in the Digital Age
Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
April 25, 2002
Mr. Assaf Litai
Founder and Acting CEO
Vidius
4605 Lankershim Blvd.
Suite 500
North Hollywood, CA, 91602
"Chairman Upton, Ranking Member Markey, and members of the Subcommittee: I am Assaf Litai, Founder of Vidius, Inc. Vidius is a start-up company, co-founded by veterans of Israel's underseas and land defense forces. It offers technology services and support to those who are concerned about the unauthorized mass distribution of their products -- movies, music, games, computer software, books, and databases -- over peer-to-peer networks. Vidius has developed and applied for twenty patents on techniques and services, which I will demonstrate today, to assist owners of such products in protecting themselves ..."
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The Last Wrd (tm)
Volume 10 - Number 7
328th issue February 23, 2001
Bathroom Bandit, editor-in-chief
serving Bellevue, Ky., from New [EMAIL PROTECTED] FM 95.7http://www.todayslastword.org
TYRANNY TIDBITS
How spittle-soaked is a world where they haven't developed technology that lets us pick up Channel 54 clearly but now has the means that enable greedy record companies to snoop on zillions of Internet users all at once and break into file transfers to make sure they don't download copyrighted music?
One Hollywood executive boasted that he witnessed a demonstration of this new legalized wiretap techonology and that it was able to pinpoint an "unauthorized" download to the ISP where it was taking place.
A company called Vidius uses its snooper software to identify people's Internet addresses, and apparently reports them to their ISP -- being the little "I'm-gonna-tell" babies that they are.
The technology can also be used to detect other kinds of files. For example, if someone downloads an educational video clip on a sensitive topic such as AIDS or teenage pregnancy thatis specifically authorized for downloads, they can be tracked by people who have no business knowing.
So much for the right to privacy!
_________________________________
Los Angeles Business Journal - March 18, 2002
New Market Found Tracing Illegal Swaps
By CHRISTOPHER KEOUGH
Hired to help track illegal sharing of copyrighted music files, a small North Hollywood software firm has found that some legitimate good has come from Napster.
Two-year-old Vidius Inc., backed by $6.5 million in venture capital, got its first big break when the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America contracted it to use its tracking technology to get a snapshot of file trading activity on the Internet.
“We started to log what was being hosted, requested and shared on the peer-to-peer networks,” said Derek Broes, chairman and chief executive. “What we found was astonishing.”
Broes was surprised to find that in swapping files employees also were providing access, wittingly or not, to scads of confidential and proprietary information on their company networks.
It wasn’t just corporations. Among the networks supporting significant peer-to-peer participants were the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Defense. Broes said he immediately recognized that something was wrong.
“It posed a major problem because there would be no way to block (the files) if they were available in the distribution system,” he said. “A bigger issue and larger security flaw is that individuals can share the most confidential information of an organization and the administration would never know.”
That’s when it occurred to Broes there was an opportunity to give businesses a way to protect its proprietary data.
The company tweaked its software, called Port Authority, to give corporate officials the power to “safeguard” information stored on the company network. Once protected, the information cannot be sent out of the network.
Unhackable
Rather than adding something to a digital file to mark it as protected, Port Authority uses what’s called contextual psychophysical extraction. The process takes a digital fingerprint of the file that is stored on its server.
When the document moves through the server on its way out of the network, the Port Authority server recognizes the signature and blocks the exit. The server sends a message to the author of the document that someone tried to send it out of the system.
Because nothing is embedded in the file, there is nothing to hack or break. Broes said it not possible to cut and paste the text into another e-mail message or system.
When Broes took the results from the peer-to-peer monitoring exercise to the companies that were hosting thousands of files, some of them containing illicit materials such as kiddie porn, many executives reacted with ambivalence.
Broes thinks they will wake up when they realize their company secrets also are available for the taking. “They could bury their head about the kiddie porn, but they can’t bury their head about their own proprietary information,” he said.
Vidius spent the past year in development of Port Authority and released the first version Feb. 1. So far, the company has sold six licenses for the new product.
Licenses for the software range from $750 per month per user station to $300,000 annually for an entire company.
Thomas Lindeman, lead program manager for Microsoft Corp.’s Content Security Server Platform Group, said he’s especially interested in how the monitoring technology can be applied to Microsoft’s digital rights management servers. The digital rights servers create software that provides the key that protects e-books. Lindeman said Vidius can provide the follow-up service to make sure the protections are successful.
Vidius was backed by CAP Ventures Inc. of Norwell, Mass., STI Ventures of the Netherlands and Lexington Ventures. The company had revenues for the first time in the fourth quarter last year, booking $250,000 in deals from the entertainment companies.
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From the Vidius website http://www.vidius.com/executive.htm
Craig Moody, CEO
Ariel Peled, VP of Research & Development
Assaf Litai, VP of Corporate Development
Kevin Moylan, VP of Product Marketing
Lidror Troyanski, Chief Scientist
Robert Caggiano, Director of Sales, Western Region
John Mayfield, Director of Sales, Eastern Region
Shmuel Nehardea, Director of Quality Assurance
Board of Directors
Board of Advisors
Craig A. Moody, CEO
Mr. Moody is a proven leader in the Media, Interactive Entertainment and IT industries, having led several turnarounds and improved financial standings for many of his companies. During his 23 years of operating experience, he has operated extensively throughout North America and Europe.
Most recently, Mr. Moody served as Managing Director for NetCatalyst Financial where he applied his turnaround and restructuring skills toward troubled companies in Europe and the United States, specifically in the technology, media and telephony sectors. During his tenure Mr. Moody restructured 7 companies which resulted in additional funding secured with a roadmap to profitability put in place. Prior to joining NetCatalyst Financial Mr. Moody served as President and COO of Save.com, where he refined and implemented business objectives, secured $11 million in investment, as well as scaling the company for rapid growth. In November of 2000, the company was sold to Valassis Communications (NYSE: VCI).
Prior to Save.com, Mr. Moody was President and Chief Executive Officer of Wave Entertainment, a digital entertainment company producing content for broadband delivery networks. Preceding Wave Entertainment, Mr. Moody served as Chief Operating Officer at Time Warner Interactive, where he grew the company from $5 million to $288 million in annual revenues and established the company as a leader in PC and Video Games. Prior thereto, as Executive VP of Tiger Media, an early entrant in the multimedia field, Mr. Moody, once again, transformed Tiger Media from an R&D company to a commercial company and successfully complete the sale of the company.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Moody was on the founding team of Merisel and served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Merisel grew to annual revenues of more than $5 Billion and established itself as the microcomputer industry's leading distributor for software and hardware products. Merisel operated in 17 countries throughout North America, Europe and Latin America.
Mr. Moody is currently a Board Member for LARTA, J.E. Moody and Company, Carbon Cloth Technologies and SeCo Mobile Inc.
Mr. Moody received his Bachelor of Science, Business Administration, Finance and Marketing from the University of Southern California.
Ariel Peled, VP Research & Development
(Co-Founder)
Ariel Peled is the General Manager of Vidius Israel and the VP of R&D of Vidius Inc. While working at Microsoft, Mr. Peled played a leading role in the development of the PM subsystem for WindowsNT and network components. Before co-founding Vidius, Mr. Peled led the development of several military projects. Mr. Peled is a graduate of the Technion, having earned his BSc. degree in Computer Engineering.
Assaf Litai, VP Corporate Development
(Co-Founder)
Mr. Litai has extensive experience managing technology-intensive research projects both inside the military and with contractors at Rafael, DSI, Lockheed Martin and SAIC. Mr. Litai was a project manager for the Israeli Navy and worked with senior technical and operational personnel in both the Israeli and US military. Mr. Litai is a graduate of the Technion, having earned his BSc. degree in Electrical Engineering.
Kevin Moylan, VP Product Marketing
Mr. Moylan has over sixteen years of technology management experience in the engineering, entertainment and new media industries. Mr. Moylan served as Vice President of Business Development and Entertainment Technology for StreamSearch.com and Director of Information Technology for Universal Studios and Sony Pictures Entertainment. In addition to his marketing responsibilities, Mr. Moylan is responsible for Vidius' strategic business development initiatives.
Dr. Lidror Troyanski, Chief Scientist
Dr. Troyanski is a leading researcher on neural networks and expert systems, and an algorithms specialist in the fields of image and signal processing, pattern recognition and computational learning. Prior to joining Vidius, Dr. Troyanski maintained a distinguished military career and led a signal-processing project for an industrial security-related company. Dr. Troyanski oversees Vidius' advanced research projects.
Robert Caggiano, Director of Sales, Western Region
Based in Beverly Hills, CA. Mr. Caggiano has over 22 years of experience in high technology with executive leadership positions in worldwide corporate sales, marketing, and channel development. Mr. Caggiano possesses extensive sales and technology management experience and specializes in Internet Security.
Prior to joining Vidius, Robert was co-owner of Network4Growth, Inc. a business development-consulting firm, Director of Sales for Baltimore Technologies, VP of US Channel Sales at IT Factory, VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Smith Micro Software and held several key management positions at Lotus Development Corporation.
Jon Mayfield, Director of Sales, Eastern Region
Based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida Mr. Mayfield has over 25 years of sales and marketing experience in the security field. Mr. Mayfield has held executive level positions in a variety of companies including Racal Electronics, CyberGuard Software and Verisign successfully executing strategic sales targets within large financial, healthcare, government and telecommunications companies. Jon possesses an MBA & BS from Eastern Illinois University. For 7 years Jon lived and worked in Asia and speaks Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and is currently learning Spanish.
Shmuel Nehardea, Director of Quality Assurance
Mr. Nehardea brings over 20 years of experience with quality assurance and customer care processes. Prior to joining Vidius Mr. Nehardea served as Vice President of Quality Assurance for WorkplaceIQ, and as Director and manager of quality assurance for Sanctum, Abirnet and Qronos. Mr. Nehardea began his career as a design and test engineer for Optrotec and later for Scitex.
Board of Directors
Dr. Michael Anghel
Harvey Gettleson
Arthur Price
Yair Grindlinger
Assaf Litai
Ariel Peled
Board of Advisors top
Louis Gonda
Bob Wynne
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