| Type | Subsidiary of Boeing |
|---|---|
| Industry | Telecommunication |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Headquarters | Sunnyvale, California, United States |
| Key people | Ori Cohen (Co-founder) |
| Products | Monitoring/surveillance systems |
| Parent | Boeing |
| Website | www.narus.com |
Narus is a company, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing, which provides real-time network traffic and analytics software.[1][2] It was co-founded in Israel in 1997 by Ori Cohen – who had served as Vice President of Business and Technology Development for VDONet, an early media streaming pioneer – and Stas Khirman.[3]
Narus is notable for being the creator of NarusInsight, a supercomputer system whose installation in AT&T's San Francisco Internet backbone gave rise to a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, Hepting v. AT&T.[4]
Contents |
Narus was founded in 1997 by a team of Israelis led by Ori Cohen and Stas Khirman.[5] It became a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing in 2010.[6][7] According to the Narus website, Cohen and Khirman are not members of the Board.[8]
Prior to 9/11 Narus worked on building carrier-grade tools to analyze IP network traffic for billing purposes, to prevent what they term "revenue leakage". Post-9/11 they have continued down that path while adding more semantic monitoring abilities for surveillance purposes.
In 2004, Narus engaged the former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, William Crowell as a director. From the Press Release announcing this:[9]
Narus has venture funding from companies including JP Morgan Partners, Mayfield, NeoCarta, Presidio Venture Partners, Walden International, Intel, NTT Software and Sumisho Electronics.
Narus has several business partners who provide various technologies similar to the features of NarusInsight. Several of the partners are funded by In-Q-Tel.
Some features of NarusInsight include:[10]
The intercepted data flows into NarusInsight Intercept Suite. This data is stored and analyzed for surveillance and forensic analysis purposes.
Other capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products, such as Pen-Link, offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules.
A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 DSL lines or 195,000 telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.
According to a company press release, the latest version of NarusInsight Intercept Suite (NIS) is "the industry's only network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and reconstruction of webmail traffic... including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gawab Mail (English and Arabic versions)." [11]
It can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening, in other words analyze the content, meaning, structure and significance of traffic in real time. The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are being monitored.