, SecurityFocus 2000-08-29
A defense contractor shows off PostMaster, a Carnivore for the rest of us.
ARLINGTON, Va.--Corporate security professionals covetous of the FBI's Carnivore system may want to take a look at PostMaster, an email-monitoring tool developed by General Dynamics Electronic Systems and displayed at Surveillance Expo 2000 here Tuesday."It's sort of a Carnivore Lite," explained Jerry Foil, a technical manager at the company.
Like the FBI's controversial surveillance tool, PostMaster scans network packets in search of email messages. But rather than culling messages to or from a particular user, as Carnivore does, PostMaster is designed to spot wayward corporate secrets, porn, or other missives that violate company policy. Messages flagged by the machine are displayed for security agents through a user-friendly interface in what Foil described as a "Microsoft Outlook style" inbox.
The company also unveiled a separate "Social Network Analysis" toolkit capable of analyzing traffic records from telephone or computer networks to follow the flow of information from person to person, creating a visual map of social structures. According to company literature, the toolkit "is suitable for a broad range of red-team services, including recognizing critical assets, identifying OPSEC spikes, and deriving knowledge of [command and control] relationships from traffic externals."
The products stood out on an exhibit floor populated mostly by a dozen displays of tiny video cameras, purported wiretap detectors and a variety of bug-finding radio spectrum analyzers. Attendees at the conference, now in its twelfth year, included private sector security professionals, at least one Pentagon official and a Russian major.
PostMaster's keyword searches makes it more akin to the NSA's Echelon surveillance system than the FBI's more limited Carnivore tool, based on the Bureau's description of the later. That's probably not a coincidence. According to the company
The rack-mounted PostMaster box can reconstruct and monitor SMTP, POP and IMAP traffic--the most commonly used network protocols for sending and receiving electronic mail. Unlike Carnivore, it does not sit directly on a local area network (LAN), but rather is installed inline between a LAN and the high-speed telephone lines connecting it upstream to the Internet. Because it monitors traffic at the point at which it leaves and enters the building, company security agents can install PostMaster without the network administrators' knowledge, said Foil.
Workplace surveillance is legal in the United States, though twin bills introduced in the