Cisco aims to balance privacy with security

To be more secure, businesses typically have to accept some level of surveillance, inviting third-party companies to track traffic and monitor network data for intruders, threats or malicious software. In a news conference in San Francisco early Tuesday announcing its new “intent-based” network, the computer networking company announced that it has found a way to detect malware hidden in encrypted traffic without decrypting, or cracking the secret code protecting the data being transmitted. “This is a truly revolutionary breakthrough,” David Goeckeler, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of its networking and security operations, said at Tuesday’s news conference. A network switch, like the Catalyst 9000, is a piece of hardware that controls computer traffic transmitted in what is known as packets, or a unit of data. Cisco’s new cybersecurity system uses machine learning to compare the sequences of packets of known malware attacks to the traffic coming into one of their Catalyst switches. Standing before a brightly flashing screen and a crowd of assembled analysts, journalists and executives, Goeckeler boasted that Cisco’s new system could rapidly decrease the amount of time it takes businesses to detect cybersecurity breaches. Malware can live in a computer network for several weeks or months before being detected by security tools commonly used by small businesses. Cisco’s new malware detection system is “reducing the gap between breach and detection from months to minutes,” Kevin Tompkins, a network architect for wickless-candle and warmer company Scentsy, said at the news conference.