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Published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on April 26, 2000. All rights reserved.
Niksun’s Strategies for War and Peace
If a 15-year-old Canadian hacker can immobilize such
giant sites as Yahoo, Amazon, e-Bay, and e-Trade, security is a crucial
concern for everyone in cyberspace. Parag Pruthi, president and CEO
of Niksun Inc. thinks he has least part of the answer. His firm has
non-intrusive network monitoring that can be used both in “times
of war” (when security needs arise) and in “peace time”
(when security is not at stake but performance levels need to be checked).
Founded in 1997, the company has moved from East Brunswick to the
Hovnanian Center at North Center Drive in North Brunswick. With clients
drawn from Fortune 100 companies and government agencies, Niksun expects
to go public and grow to 130 people, not necessarily in that order.
“We are unique in the marketplace,” says Jayne Fitzgerald,
vice president of business development and operations. “Our president
and CEO was visionary. He spent a tremendous amount of time working
out the innovative approach to doing this. Our equipment is completely
novel.”
“It took Yahoo and other companies several hours to shut down
this attack on their network. If they had had our product installed,
they would have known of this malicious activity within a fraction
of a second,” says Pruthi. “It would have taken only minutes,
not hours, to identify the source of this attack and shut it down.
Rather than losing several million dollars in revenue they would have
provided the level of service one expects to receive when dealing
with a customer like Yahoo. Yahoo’s business was hijacked by a 15-year-old,
and that is ridiculous.”
Niksun has dual purpose programs for both security and performance
issues. Its programs can secure a network from illegal intruders,
but the same programs can — in “peacetime” — deal
with performance issues:
Keep a company from losing customers due to poor performanceor capacity limitation.Check to see if a carrier is meeting the network performancelevels its clients are paying for.Check to see if employees are using the network in an inappropriateway.Top Of PageNot Firewalls, Not SniffersNiksun’s products should not be confused with firewalls, a wayof locking the network if a breach occurs. A firewall tries to keepthe fox out of the henhouse, but the Niksun products give in-depthinformation once the fox is inside, telling where the fox dug thehole, how many eggs the fox broke, where the fox is at the moment,and how many chickens are dead. This information is obtained almostinstantaneously.Pruthi compares firewalls to traffic cops while his products are likethe hovering helicopters. “A cop typically stands in the pathof the traffic. His vision is limited by his height. If I come ina helicopter I can report on what is going on, where it is comingfrom, and what the problem is.”Firewalls, says Pruthi, lock everybody out or allow certainholes in. “The product we have is more similar to a camera inthe network than a lock. Both are necessary for security enhancement.One is incomplete without the other. There are a lot of firewall companies,but no one with a camera in the network, available in an instant.”Niksun’s products are also different from “sniffers” or “protocolanalyzers.” A sniffer records everything, and software on topof that pulls out the significant events, explains Michael MarkulecJr., COO of Research Park-based Nex-i.com, which offers networkingservices to small to medium companies of up to 100 work stations.”Most Fortune 500 companies should already be doing somethinglike this,” he says (www.nex-i.com).”A sniffer-type product must be preprogrammed, but with ours,filters can be applied after the fact,” says Pruthi, noting thatthe currently well-known sniffer, marketed by Network Associates,has very limited capabilities. “It can look only at what is storedin the RAM and does not do continuous storage to disk for extendedperiods of time. Not only are we able to do this, but we are alsoable to analyze the data and correlate the information across theglobe.”Pruthi points to his distributed analysis engine that allows the clientto do pattern matching across the network. “Suppose you were interestedin finding out the root cause of a malicious problem and you neededto know who sent what information and from where. If someone weretrying to hide an identity, you would be able track it right back.””This high speed storage of information for many kinds of networks— and simultaneously being able to process the information andconvert it to intelligence — this highly sophisticated systemdoes not exist in any products,” says Pruthi.Located in a box that looks like a router, the productsunobtrusively gather information from the network and can work ina multi-vendor environment. Among Niksun’s products is NetVCR, whichdoes what a VCR does in the home — record and play back later.When you are concerned about a network security or performance problem,you define the attributes of the problem you want to look at, andthen you can see those statistics.Another product, Net Detector, is a next-generation non-intrusiveInternet monitoring and response program. To identify if there hasbeen a breach of security, it records what has been compromised aswould a camera. Or, if you have a spike in the network, it recordswhen it occurred and what delay resulted. If the problem was an intruderor hacker trying to compromise the network, you can go back and findout what was done. “The client evaluates what it wants to record,how much data it wants to keep, and determines the thresholds,”says Fitzgerald. For a large scale system, the cost might be $50,000.”Currently we are focused on direct end-user sales,” saysPruthi. “That gives us a lot of information to fine tune the product.We are in discussions with other manufacturers. To install it is almostas easy as plugging a computer into the network.”Top Of PageParag PruthiPruthi grew up in New Delhi and Old Bridge, where his father was anentrepreneur who started several companies and his mother was a botanist.His one brother heads one of the family’s equipment exporting businesses.It is part of his family’s religious tradition, he says, to work hardand leave all else up to God. And like many successful entrepreneurs,Pruthi’s parents told him there was nothing he could not do if heworked for it. But in Pruthi’s case, when he was 15 years old, hisfather gave him a difficult task, to devise a complex computer programto automate his office using a very old Atari Tandy computer. “Ittook me a good four months, and from that time I realized that I shouldnot back down but should keep chipping away. It was an assignmentnobody thought I could do, but I did it,” says Pruthi.He went to Stevens Institute, Class of 1987, and has a master’s incomputer science and a PhD in telecommunications. He worked for Bellcorein operations and business areas and has 11 years experience in theglobal telecommunications industry and academic research. Pruthi foundedthis company, along with a couple of senior engineers, starting in1997. The name of the company is the shortened version of the namesof the Pruthi’s two sons.The vice president of engineering is Mahendra Pratap, formerly withLucent Technologies and AT&T; he has a doctor’s degree in nuclearphysics. Les Hribar is vice president of worldwide sales. Satish Pruthi is vice president of finance and administration.Niksun was among the equipment vendors to join the Alliance for InternetSecurity sponsored by www.ICSA.net, which offers security assuranceservices for Internet-connected companies.Patents are pending and Pruthi is not worried about other companiestaking his ideas. “Real time alerting and programming of new filtersin a dynamic manner is not very easy for anyone to copy. This is inno way an unsophisticated task,” says Pruthi. “We are collectingdata, converting data to information, and converting information tointelligence and doing all of that in real time requires sophisticatedtechnology.”The company’s attorneys are Christopher Dervishian of Ratner Prestiain Philadelphia and Kevin D’Amour of Reed Smith Shaw & McClay at ForrestalVillage (www.rssm.com). The accountant, J.B. Oza, is from Hazlet. Venture capitalfunding comes from the Silicon Valley — Redwood Venture’s RajvirSingh, founder of a company that was sold to Cisco Systems for $7billion.With recent financing from venture capitalists on the west coast,the company is on an IPO path. “It is an exciting path,” saysFitzgerald, the vice president for business development. “Ourgrowth rate is expected to be 300 percent this year.””We now have a product suite for monitoring quality of service,security, and service level validation, and we are on the revenuegrowth and client acquisition paths. Last year before the productwent generally available we had as many as 30 customers chomping atthe bit to do a beta test,” says Fitzgerald.Another sign of the times: Just after Niksun was introduced to oneof the companies that was victimized by the 15-year-old in February,it was hired on a trial basis by that firm.— Barbara FoxNiksun Inc., 111 North Center Drive, North Brunswick08902. Parag Pruthi, president and CEO. 732-821-5000; fax, 732-821-6000.Home page: www.niksun.com.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
