DNS - Neustar's Joffe Speaks the Importance of Threat Protection

Security when it comes to any type of computer system or network is essential and in order to understand how to protect the system, you must understand the system. One person who both understands and protects a system most of us rely on is Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and chief technologist for Neustar.

Joffe's company provides trunk-line service for competing cell-phone companies throughout the world and Joffe himself leads the cabal that was created to battle the worm, Conficker. While this worm is certainly a thorn in Joffe's side, he also wants to protect Neustar's operation.

Neustar runs a huge, local-number-portability database and nearly every phone call made in North America interacts with Neustar is it must ask the company where to go. With a large number of competing telephone companies, cell phones and an environment where the person's phone number is no longer necessarily tied to a geographic location, someone needs to track every single number and know where to route calls.

This someone is really a number of individuals within Neustar who perform this service for telephone calls. The company is one of the many registries that oversee high-level Internet domains. Joffe refers to the registry as "the map." If the map is taken down, whole countries can actually disappear from the grid. Joffe notes that they are connected, yet no one can find their way there because the map has disappeared.

Conficker is a botnet that in theory could actually shut down the entire Neustar system. To help ensure this doesn't happen, Joffe helped to form the Conficker Cabal. He hopes to combine the expertise of many to keep ahead of this malicious worm.

When he read in late 2009 that the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security planned to hire "a thousand" computer-security experts over the next three years, he scoffed. According to Joffe, there aren't more than a few hundred people in the world who actually understand this stuff, putting quite the strain on the administration's plans. 

There are a number of different threats that can pose a risk for networks or companies such as Neustar, but the three that need the most attention are Trojans, viruses and worms.

If a worm were to infect the Neustar system, it wouldn't just hurt the company; it would cause chaos for all of us trying to connect a call. And, considering Neustar interacts with nearly all of our numbers, an infection for them could also mean an infection for us - not one we want to contract.