Defence Intelligence, often referred to as Defintel, is an information security company based in
Ottawa
Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...
, Ontario, Canada. The company characterizes itself as offering services for "advanced compromise protection." Their marketing materials describe their services as being for the detection and prevention of compromised systems on a network, and include their Nemesis Compromise Protection (Nemesis) and Harbinger Compromise Assessment (Harbinger) services.
Defence Intelligence was the security company that discovered the
Mariposa botnet
The Mariposa botnet, discovered December 2008, is a botnet mainly involved in cyberscamming and denial-of-service attacks. Before the botnet itself was dismantled on 23 December 2009, it consisted of up to 12 million unique IP addresses or up to 1 ...
in 2008, which consisted of 8 to 12 million individual zombie computers at the time of its dismantling in 2009.
History
Defence Intelligence was founded in 2008 by Christopher Davis, a Canadian security consultant who had previously aided in identifying an 18-year-old hacker in 2000 that stole 26,000 credit card numbers from e-commerce sites. Chris Davis collaborated along with
Dan Kaminsky
Daniel Kaminsky (February 7, 1979 – April 23, 2021) was an American computer security researcher. He was a co-founder and chief scientist of WhiteOps, a computer security company. He previously worked for Cisco, Avaya, and IOActive, where he ...
to inform key agencies in the Canadian government about the
DNS cache poisoning
DNS spoofing, also referred to as DNS cache poisoning, is a form of computer security hacking in which corrupt Domain Name System data is introduced into the DNS resolver's cache, causing the name server to return an incorrect result record, e.g ...
flaw. Prior to founding Defence Intelligence, Davis was the director of threat analysis for the Atlanta-based security company
Damballa (company)
Core Security by HelpSystems is an American computer and network security company provides cyber threat prevention and identity access management software products and services, including penetration testing, network traffic analysis, threat det ...
.
In 2008, Defence Intelligence discovered the
Mariposa botnet
The Mariposa botnet, discovered December 2008, is a botnet mainly involved in cyberscamming and denial-of-service attacks. Before the botnet itself was dismantled on 23 December 2009, it consisted of up to 12 million unique IP addresses or up to 1 ...
, one of the largest known botnets to date. In 2009, the Mariposa Working Group was formed. The MWG, consisting of members from Defence Intelligence, Panda Security, Neustar, Directi, and Georgia Tech Information Security Center, worked with international law enforcement to dismantle the botnet and aid in the arrest of the suspected creator and controllers of the botnet.
In 2011 Keith Murphy, founder and president of non-profit One Dollar Nation, became CEO of Defence Intelligence. While no formal press release was made stating this change, numerous news articles began referring to Keith Murphy as CEO. In that same year the company released Nemesis 2.0, the most current version of their main service and launched a new website with updated branding.
Mariposa
Mariposa, meaning "butterfly" in Spanish, was the name given to the botnet as a whole due to its usage of the malware program "Butterfly bot". The botnet was composed of millions of infected or zombie computers controlled by the same operators. The number of computers infected by Mariposa was between 8 and 12 million spread over 190 countries. Victims included more than half of the US Fortune 1000 companies as well as numerous governments and financial and educational institutions. Mariposa was used for denial of service attacks,
spamming
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especia ...
, and personal information theft. It was capable of spreading via MSN, peer to peer networks, and USB keys.
The Spanish national police
Civil Guard (Spain) arrested three men in February 2010 for suspected involvement with the
Mariposa botnet
The Mariposa botnet, discovered December 2008, is a botnet mainly involved in cyberscamming and denial-of-service attacks. Before the botnet itself was dismantled on 23 December 2009, it consisted of up to 12 million unique IP addresses or up to 1 ...
. In July 2010 the suspected creator of the "Butterfly bot" malware was arrested by Slovenian police.
References
{{Reflist, 32em
External links
Company Website
Security companies of Canada