Spies sign on for Kiwi's terror tool

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

A computer card developed in Hamilton is playing a key role in hunting international terrorists.

A Waikato University team led by former archaeologist Professor Ian Graham, made the first card for US$2000 ($3026) because they could not afford the US$100,000 machine which was all there was to study traffic flows on the internet.

Today most Western intelligence agencies use the team's cards to track internet traffic for key words and sources that may alert them to terrorists.

And Dr Graham has found a taste for business. When he started, he freely admits, he "knew nothing about business". Now he works fulltime for a company, Endace, which has earned almost $10 million in the financial year ending this month.

"I would like to see a $100 million company within three years," he said this week.

It is not the 56-year-old's first big career change. Born in Britain, he started with a doctorate in radio astronomy at Cambridge, then switched to archaeology for 15 years - work which included building computer databases.

He and his wife brought their family to New Zealand in 1985 and Dr Graham took a job lecturing in computer science at Waikato.

It was then that he got interested in the remarkable phenomenon of the internet.

Stephen Donnelly, who started out as Dr Graham's doctoral student and now works for him at Endace, said people had built computer simulations of how the internet worked, but no one had actually measured how traffic moved around the world in reality.

"You could buy commercial equipment to do it, but it was very expensive and it only measured traffic flows for a few seconds," he said. "We were focused on being able to record the state of the network for long periods of time with very accurate timing. No one else had done that."

The team developed a card that splits the tiny packets of light that carry emails or website access instructions along the cables that now span the world.

"The optical splitter takes 10 per cent of the light off to one side, and if you use our card you can see a copy of all the internet traffic passing that point," Dr Graham said.

"We put a time stamp on it and feed it to software which gets out the information the user needs. So you don't slow the network down. It's non-intrusive, the individual doesn't know you are there."

At a stroke, the system superseded the machines that had been used to monitor the internet. The card was priced, depending on the capabilities, anywhere from $50,000 down to $2000.

Dr Graham and his team began to get inquiries from around the world, and sold a few cards as a result. When sales hit $1 million, Dr Graham decided he needed some business advice, and visited management professor Neil Richardson.

Dr Richardson brought in Selwyn Pellett, a former executive with the multinational company Avnet. Together, the trio have now sold Endace cards to 86 customers in 16 countries.

"We started in October 2001, immediately after September 11," Dr Graham said. "We immediately got a whole lot of interest from people who wanted to do network monitoring.

"Now 80 per cent of our business is monitoring, intrusion detection systems and firewalls."

Security agencies do not like suppliers giving away their secrets, so Dr Graham said he could speak only hypothetically of what agencies such as the CIA "would be able to do" with Endace computer cards.

"Our card would take data out of the network," he said. "Our tools would enable them to get down to a very detailed level of analysis."

Mr Pellett believes an agreement with a multibillion-dollar US company will lift Endace sales above $35 million in the next financial year.

Endace