Sourcefire CTO: Network security needs a revamp

During a recent visit to Australia, Martin Roesch, also developer of SNORT, network intrusion prevention technology, said today’s current security technology remain static and relies too much on human interaction, which is a problem.

“Static defences haven’t worked well in the physical world, why would they work well in a network world? How does your firewall know how to reconfigure itself per threat?

“It relies on people like you and me to change configurations, complete file requirements and ask next level for authorisation, all while a worm is tearing up the firewall. We need machines to do this automatically,” he said.

Roesch was in Australia last week to address Sourcefire’s Australian partners and end-users during seminars in both Sydney and Melbourne and kicked-off Sourcefire’s global training and education programme.

Discussing the shortcoming of today’s security, Roesch said developers need to be smarter, the technology has to be able to understand the context of threats.

“If we are going to rely on people, we are going to be stuck where we are today - 20 years down the road and we haven’t seen a lot of innovation.”

According to Roesch, there has not been significant investment in innovation in security technology in the last 10 years.

“[Innovators] have this nasty tendency to build products that fix only one problem. Start-ups don’t worry about integration because the big player that acquires them will worry about that."

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