WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Elastic N.V. (NYSE: ESTC) ("Elastic"), the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced that the Missouri National Guard Cybersecurity (MOCYBER)-led RockNSM project has won the 2018 Public Sector Innovation Award. The award, part of 1105 Media’s Annual Government Innovation Awards recognizes outstanding innovation across government in six categories including cybersecurity. RockNSM (Response Operations Collections Network Kit, Network Security Monitoring) is a network security monitoring program that identifies threat patterns in communications traffic. It was built using the Elastic Stack and allows users to securely take data from any source and in any format, and then search, analyze and visualize it in real time.
The 2018 Government Innovation Awards showcase the best examples of discovery and innovation in government IT by highlighting the next generation of transformative technologies that are truly reinventing government at the federal, state and local levels. That potentially mission-critical impact can stem from a new technology itself or from the innovative ways established technology is being used to make government function better.
Prior to the development of RockNSM, it took the MOCYBER team two full days to collect the information necessary to respond to security incidents. A team of weekend Reservists led by Captain Derek Ditch, developed RockNSM to transform cyber operations from a defensive, reactive situation to an offensive, predictive situation. It’s improved their chances of predicting hacks and also dramatically improved post-event forensics. The program has been so successful that it has been adopted by military and government agencies and commercial entities around the world.
“Traditional security approaches that leverage technologies like firewalls, policies, and signatures by themselves, are no longer effective against today’s threats. In addition to those tools, we need to monitor the metadata of all our network traffic,” said Derek Ditch, founder and core developer for RockNSM. “With RockNSM we can now identify threats that have no signatures, based upon the behavior of the actor. This is a total game changer. More importantly, we’re able to collaborate with others in the open source community to constantly improve our tactics and platform for detecting the most advanced threats.”
“The demands of cybersecurity teams have dramatically changed in the past decade, and their organizations are faced with volume and speed of network traffic never experienced before,” said George Young, Area Vice President, Public Sector at Elastic. “Programs like RockNSM are to be applauded not only for their effectiveness and ability to operate in this environment but also for their ability to operate independently on top of existing networks. This is a great example of the kind of innovation that is happening across the government, where a group of people who care about the mission leverage Elastic to do what otherwise could not be done due to budget or performance limitations of existing solutions. We applaud this group for their innovation as well as sharing with the community at large to address the security of our most valued national assets.”
MOCYBER and other award winners were honored last week at the Government Innovation Awards ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton Tysons Corner.
About Elastic
Elastic is a search company. As the creators of the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash), Elastic builds self-managed and SaaS offerings that make data usable in real time and at scale for search, logging, security, and analytics use cases.
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