Kentik

Last updated
Kentik
Company type Private
Industry Internet
Founded2014;10 years ago (2014) in San Francisco, California, United States
Founders
Headquarters,
United States [1]
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Website kentik.com

Kentik is an American network observability, network monitoring and anomaly detection company headquartered in San Francisco, California. [2] [3]

Contents

History

Kentik was founded in 2014 as CloudHelix by Co-founders Avi Freedman, Ian Applegate, Ian Pye, and Justin Biegel. The company changed its name to Kentik in 2015. [4]

Technology

Kentik's Network Observability Cloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that ingests NetFlow and other network data and analyzes it to provide network monitoring and anomaly detection services for the operators of Internet-connected networks. Kentik's underlying data engine is a clustered datastore modeled on Dremel. [5] The engine collects and correlates live operational data from Internet routers and switches to produce network activity and health information.

Analysis

Since November 2020, Kentik has been the organizational home of Doug Madory's Internet routing analysis practice, previously associated with Renesys and Renesys' subsequent acquirers DynDNS and Oracle. While employed by Kentik, Madory discovered the Global Resource Systems IP address hijacking which occurred during the final hours of the Trump administration [6] [7] [8] [9] and was the first to accurately quantify the 2021 Facebook outage, the largest communications outage in history. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

Related Research Articles

An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a device or software application that monitors a network or systems for malicious activity or policy violations. Any intrusion activity or violation is typically either reported to an administrator or collected centrally using a security information and event management (SIEM) system. A SIEM system combines outputs from multiple sources and uses alarm filtering techniques to distinguish malicious activity from false alarms.

Network security consists of the policies, processes and practices adopted to prevent, detect and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources. Network security involves the authorization of access to data in a network, which is controlled by the network administrator. Users choose or are assigned an ID and password or other authenticating information that allows them access to information and programs within their authority. Network security covers a variety of computer networks, both public and private, that are used in everyday jobs: conducting transactions and communications among businesses, government agencies and individuals. Networks can be private, such as within a company, and others which might be open to public access. Network security is involved in organizations, enterprises, and other types of institutions. It does as its title explains: it secures the network, as well as protecting and overseeing operations being done. The most common and simple way of protecting a network resource is by assigning it a unique name and a corresponding password.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dyn (company)</span> Former Internet infrastructure company

Dyn, Inc. was an Internet performance management company that also dealt with web application security, offering products to monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure, and also domain registration services and email products. The company was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2016. It began operating as a global business unit of Oracle in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bulletproof hosting</span> Internet service for use by cyber-criminals

Bulletproof hosting (BPH) is technical infrastructure service provided by an Internet hosting service that is resilient to complaints of illicit activities, which serves criminal actors as a basic building block for streamlining various cyberattacks. BPH providers allow online gambling, illegal pornography, botnet command and control servers, spam, copyrighted materials, hate speech and misinformation, despite takedown court orders and law enforcement subpoenas, allowing such material in their acceptable use policies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">F5, Inc.</span> U.S. information technology company

F5, Inc. is an American technology company specializing in application security, multi-cloud management, online fraud prevention, application delivery networking (ADN), application availability & performance, network security, and access & authorization.

BGP hijacking is the illegitimate takeover of groups of IP addresses by corrupting Internet routing tables maintained using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

Zeek is a free and open-source software network analysis framework. Vern Paxson began development work on Zeek in 1995 at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Zeek is a network security monitor (NSM) but can also be used as a network intrusion detection system (NIDS). The Zeek project releases the software under the BSD license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IP camera</span> Network-connected digital video camera

An Internet Protocol camera, or IP camera, is a type of digital video camera that receives control data and sends image data via an IP network. They are commonly used for surveillance, but, unlike analog closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, they require no local recording device, only a local area network. Most IP cameras are webcams, but the term IP camera or netcam usually applies only to those that can be directly accessed over a network connection.

Network behavior anomaly detection (NBAD) is a security technique that provides network security threat detection. It is a complementary technology to systems that detect security threats based on packet signatures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Splunk</span> American technology company

Splunk Inc. is an American software company based in San Francisco, California, that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a web-style interface. Its software helps capture, index and correlate real-time data in a searchable repository, from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.

Lumen Technologies, Inc. is an American telecommunications company headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, which offers communications, network services, security, cloud solutions, voice and managed services through its fiber optic and copper networks, as well as its data centers and cloud computing services. The company has been included in the S&P 600 index since being removed from the S&P 500 in March 2023.

In computing, a firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules. A firewall typically establishes a barrier between a trusted network and an untrusted network, such as the Internet.

Security information and event management (SIEM) is a field within computer security that combines security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) to enable real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications and network hardware. SIEM systems are central to the operation of security operations centers (SOCs), where they are employed to detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents. SIEM technology collects and aggregates data from various systems, allowing organizations to meet compliance requirements while safeguarding against threats.

Internet censorship in Syria is extensive; with numerous websites and online platforms being banned for political reasons. Internet usage is authorized only through state-run servers and people accessing through other means are arrested. Filtering and blocking was found to be pervasive in the political and Internet tools areas, and selective in the social and conflict/security areas by the OpenNet Initiative in August 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet outage</span> Loss of internet functionality over a small or large area

An Internet outage or Internet blackout or Internet shutdown is the complete or partial failure of the internet services. It can occur due to censorship, cyberattacks, disasters, police or security services actions or errors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dynatrace</span> American technology company

Dynatrace, Inc. is a global technology company that provides a software observability platform based on artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Dynatrace technologies are used to monitor, analyze, and optimize application performance, software development and security practices, IT infrastructure, and user experience for businesses and government agencies throughout the world.

Gigamon is a privately held computer security company with products that delivers network-derived intelligence and insights to cloud, security, observability, and network management tools. It is one of the main parts in the deep observability market. Formerly traded publicly, it is now owned by Elliott Management and headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Cloud</span> Cloud computing service

Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows these services to be provisioned on demand over the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2021 Facebook outage</span> Outage affecting all Facebook operated services

On October 4, 2021, at 15:39 UTC, the social network Facebook and its subsidiaries, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Mapillary, and Oculus, became globally unavailable for a period of six to seven hours. The outage also prevented anyone trying to use "Log in with Facebook" from accessing third-party sites. It lasted for 7 hours and 11 minutes.

Doug Madory is an American Internet routing infrastructure expert, who specializes in analyzing Internet Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing data to diagnose Internet routing disruptions, such as those caused by communications fiber cable cuts, routing equipment failures, and governmental censorship. His academic background is in computer engineering, and he was a signals specialist in the U.S. Air Force, before arriving at his present specialty, which has occupied his professional career.

References

  1. "Kentik Contact" . Retrieved 22 October 2021.
  2. McCormick, John (7 October 2021). "Network-Monitoring Firm Kentik Raises $40 Million in New Funding". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 22 October 2021.
  3. Wiggers, Kyle (7 October 2021). "Network observability startup Kentik lands $40M". VentureBeat. Retrieved 22 October 2021.
  4. Kerner, Sean Michael (2 July 2015). "CloudHelix, Renamed Kentik, Raises $12M for Security, Network Visibility". eWeek. Retrieved 22 October 2021.
  5. Hall, Susan (14 September 2016). "Kentik Is a Data Engine Modeled after Google Dremel". The New Stack. Retrieved 22 October 2021.
  6. Timberg, Craig (24 April 2021). "Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life". Washington Post. Retrieved 2 January 2022.
  7. Kay, Grace (1 May 2021). "4 unanswered questions about the mysterious company that began managing a big chunk of the internet minutes before Biden was sworn in". Business Insider. Retrieved 2 January 2022.
  8. Naraine, Ryan (29 April 2021). "Doug Madory on the mysterious AS8003 global routing story". Security Conversations.
  9. Bajak, Frank (25 April 2021). "The big Pentagon internet mystery now partially solved". Associated Press. Retrieved 26 October 2021.
  10. Geer, David (16 November 2021). "What Caused the Facebook Outage?". Communications of the ACM. Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 2 January 2022.
  11. Krebs, Brian (4 October 2021). "hat Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?". Krebs on Security.
  12. "'We're sorry' says Facebook after 'epic' worldwide outage". Associated Press. 4 October 2021. Retrieved 2 January 2022.
  13. Evans, Pete (4 October 2021). "Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp back online after global outage". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 2 January 2022.
  14. Madory, Doug (5 October 2021). "Facebook's historic outage, explained". Kentik.
  15. Madory, Doug (4 October 2021). "Facebook suffers global outage". Kentik. Archived from the original on October 4, 2021. Retrieved October 4, 2021.