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Firewall Company Palo Alto Buys Stealthy Startup Formed By Ex-NSAers
alphadogg writes "Next-generation firewall maker Palo Alto Networks today announced its first acquisition, an intriguing buyout of a stealthy Mountain View start-up called Morta Security whose founders hail from the NSA. The price of the purchase was not disclosed. Morta that has been in stealth mode since 2012 and describes its founders as 'executives and engineers from the National Security Agency.' CEO Raj Shahsays he worked in the Air Force Reserve supporting the NSA. 'We have deep experience in protecting our national infrastructure,' he says. (Curious to see if more startups will start marketing their NSA heritage...)"
Hmmm, maybe I'll *not* buy their firewall...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
remote access for the NSA
> whose founders hail from the NSA
> CEO Raj Shahsays he worked in the Air Force Reserve supporting the NSA
They aren't really the same thing now are they?
When there is corruption you need to employ a former "insider" before your bids on contracts are even looked at.
Why do you think people like the person that lost the White House emails is employable by a data recovery company?
I beg your pardon? This coming from the fuckwits who insist on just about everything having unfixed holes and/or backdoors? Unless by "deep experience" they are referring to having their heads up their asses, I call BS.
What do you think would increase security more, in the long run - firewalls by the NSA, or firing squads for the NSA? Sad thing is, what starts out as a polemic rhetorical question is actually not that easy to answer, now is it.
That has any past connection, through staff or projects, with the NSA is now about as popular as cancer.
Well, that's better. Why bother pretending to be something other than a paid-off PR/click-bait site?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Must be gunning for government contracts, I don't know how many people are looking for security infrastructure that's not likely to actually *be* secure, by design?
"Morta" in Italian means, "dead man".
Draw your own conclusions.
Forget Left and Right, Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat. We are all enemies of the State now. It's starting to look like those divisions have just been artificially put in place in order to make us easier to control. When we're fighting each other, we're not paying attention to the real bad guys. And the bad guys goal is to take everything. If you're not part of the financial/political elite, you're not in the car, you're standing on the side of the road.
Nothing can really get better - not one thing - unless we deal with this security apparatus in a lasting way. It makes us less secure, poorer and sliding down the economic scale. And today, Janet Yellin was installed as the new bursar for this apparatus, in charge of siphoning wealth to the very few.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What a great way to save on $10 million dollar backdoor fees - have your ex-employees build the devices themselves!
Hagrin.com
Not fooled.
People who don't actually work in cybersecurity.
Surely the NSA have a number of means of bypassing the firewall by now ...
"Morta Security, another of the start-ups, was founded by Raj Shah, a former F-16 fighter pilot for the Air Force in Iraq. He described himself as âoea policy adviserâ to the N.S.A. before moving to Silicon Valley to establish the company this year with two former analysts. Mortaâ(TM)s work is in such âoestealth mode,â in valley parlance, that the company has said nothing about what it is working on. Nor would Mr. Shah describe fully what his two co-founders were doing at the agency before they formed the company. "
An Air force pilot? really ? no history ? nothing anywhere on the web including the seclists /waves hand....charlatans everywhere
"Good evening Mr. Sir, I am being your Microsofts supporting person. My name is being Raj Shah and I am being afraid I must inform you that your Windows is being having a virus..."
What's the big deal? I mean, do you think Wernher von Braun's later work was bad just because his former boss wasn't the nicest guy in the world?
Circumcision is child abuse.
I never understood firewalls, especially firewall appliances.
Engineer #1: Our application has a ton of security holes. ....
Engineer #2: Hey, I have an idea. Let's put another application in front of our other application to hide the bugs.
[later]
Engineer #1: Our firewall application has bugs
Engineer #2: Hey, I have an idea.
It's doubly retarded for all Linux shops, because most firewall appliances are running Linux these days. Which means you add precisely nothing by slapping another appliance into the mix. Your web application is still accessible, and your outward facing "firewall" is running the same network stack. (Okay, some appliances run FreeBSD; their network stack may be different, but hardly any less complex and bug-free.)
All "firewalls" do is add more tinder to burn--in other words, increases your attack surface. This is especially true for "application firewalls" which try to filter requests, because they're probably running more code underneath the covers than your own web application. Firewall manufacturers can't magically ship bug free code anymore than you can. If your CEO won't spend the money on competent engineers, he's not gonna fork over the money it would take for an appliance manufacturer to similarly hire competent engineers. (Think about it. Mere specialization won't help much here for myriad reasons.) Ultimately, it's difficult to do much better than simply managing your ports--e.g. don't let dumb software listen on an external interface. Problem... solved. Plus, imagine the gajillion of hours saved not twiddling your thumbs when IT's super-1337 firewall rules break the network.
P.S. I'm a principal engineer--and a few months removed from founding engineer--at one of the largest firewall appliance companies in Silicon Valley. So, please, keep your trite "best practice" advice to yourself. I understand all the counter-arguments. IMNSHO, the internet would be a more secure place if we spent more time fixing bugs (in code and in design) and less time building a house of cards to hide them. And this is true collectively as well as individually. The fewer systems and devices on your network, the easier it will be to manage them securely.
NSA live this one down? The people will not have it.
Either "Raj Shahsays" is a ghost, or the name is fake.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22Raj+Shahsays%22
I really don't know what's wrong with decently spec'd commodity blade server running OpenBSD and pf. Does everything you need it to and it's trustworthy -- written by a team that truly know what they are doing. The code audits are reassuring. I've never, ever had an issue with OpenBSD. No one else has their track record. Why complicate matters with expensive hw/sw, licensing issues, dodgy network compatibility.
Disclaimer: IT guy with almost two decades of experience in BSD/Linux/Windows systems administration and security.
I'm not indignant, just amused.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It's not our fault that just about anything coming from that general direction makes everybody else seem like a super intelligent saint. Your jealousy is duly noted.
I know I risk troll feeding, but another cretin who can't tell Indian from Arab names. There should be a space between Shah and says. The CEO's name would be Raj Shah
So now, instead of paying 10 mil to "security companies" and having all those nasty paper trails, the NSA just implants its ex-employees in those same "security companies" so that they can add backdoors by hand? That... is actually a pretty good idea, because it gives them a broader reach and is more cost effective.
you can build rockets for hitler, or you can build rockets for truman. they're both still rockets. you can test the rocket, make sure it works, you can separate the creator of the tech from the tech
but security is not like that. it's an ongoing trust relationship. you have to trust the people involved
and if your previous job was secretly sabotaging all security to a govt, this is probably not someone you want to trust your company's security to. when the NSA breaches your system, they have an ally already inside your system. if you didn't have a problem working for the NSA before, you probably still don't have any problems with their behavior, the defilement of our foundational rights
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeeeaah... no. Fuck off.
Its just shows that Palo Alto's acquisition team don't know what they are doing. A firewall product is a firewall product, what makes the difference is code quality and third parties not being forced to backdoor their equipment through the introduction of random remote exploits.
The idea that these guys worked at the NSA and thus have some mysterious knowledge in regards to security, is well, complete bullshit.
They already have at least one ex-NSA employee named Snowden as a consultant.
Not stealthy enough apparently. Rumor also has it that they are going to sell human sized fly-paper traps that way the ex-NSA-ers could stick it to the man.
Will never buy one of their firewalls then...