Cyber security is a hot topic, especially in national security circles. The world has witnessed a number of high-profile incidents in the past two years that have been notable for sharing three very important aspects:

• they were targeted attacks, carried out against specific institutions
• they were politically motivated, and, inconclusively, appear to be state-sponsored
• they used multiple-step, multi-vectors attacks and managed to evade existing security countermeasures

This deviates from the types of attacks that IT-centric approaches have sought to defend networks against. Traditional approaches neutralize the perceived threats against a network with a host of countermeasures: firewalls, malware scanners, automated network vulnerability scanning, patch policies, and intrusion detection systems. The network defenses can learn new tricks when the administrators update the signatures, or, for certain types of data, employ a Bayesian inference strategy (as has been employed to fight spam). This approach does a good job of protecting against untargeted attacks as well as weak targeted attacks.

Full network defense requires human analysts looking at anomalies at a level above the automated countermeasures. Check out the rest of this post to take a look at how human-driven, computer-aided analysis is a game changer in cyber security.

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Palantir is an intense place to work. There are people here around the clock (since developers set their own schedules) and folks and equipment arriving and leaving all the time. We’re a very focused bunch, trying to change the world as fast as we can by creating a whole new class of tools.

However, we’re not just people who build software; we’re sons and daughters, mothers and fathers and citizens of our community. As we headed into the holidays, Palantir employees decided to give something back: we signed up with a local organization call The Family Giving Tree, a now national charity that started as an MBA project out of San Jose State University.

The Family Giving Tree is unique in that it allows children to request the presents that they want. In this way, rather than putting money into a black box of a charity, you purchase the gift itself and donate that.

The people of Palantir Technologies purchased over 100 gifts, fulfilling the holiday wishes of the children that asked for them as well as cash donations that will buy gifts for at least 40 more.

The pile of presents collected by Palantir employees for The Family Giving Tree.

Happy Holidays, everyone! We’ll be back next year with more technical articles and information about Palantir.

On Oct. 9th, Palantir hosted our quarterly Government Conference in the DC area. The idea was to bring together customers of Palantir Government from across the defense and intelligence community to create a forum for them to:

• Talk candidly about their experiences using Palantir
• Discuss the many different domains they apply our technology against, everything from cyber defense to counter-terrorism to counter-proliferation
• Share experiences deploying our large distributed systems
• Learn about and see what new features and capabilities are in the pipeline for our next quarterly release

Most of the conference time is allocated to our government customers to present information on how they are using Palantir to provide deep mission impact. While this is only the second conference we have held using this open, customer-focused forum, nearly 200 people attended.

The speakers included:

• Lt. Col. Robert “Pic” Piccerillo (ret), from the Counter IED Operations Integration Center (COIC)
• David Arsenault, Assistant Department Head at MITRE
• Mike Jennings, an intelligence analyst from the FBI

In addition to presentations/demonstrations from our customers, there were several presentations of new functionality and demos by us—including demonstrations of our:

• Application platform, which allows customers to easily extend Palantir’s frontend by writing applications and helpers that embed in our platform framework
• New geospatial capabilities, including geosearch, geotagging, and other integrated workflows not seen elsewhere
• PalantirWeb—the new Palantir thin client/web frontend for expanded organizational integration

We also had a very special presentation from Jeff Carr, author of the IntelFusion blog. Jeff launched an open-source intelligence effort to analyze the actors and nature of the cyber war launched against Georgia that paralleled the Russian invasion called Project Grey Goose. Jeff presented some very compelling analytic tradecraft used in and some preliminary results from Project Grey Goose. The iteration 1 report comes out next week!

All in all, the conference went extremely well: it was gratifying for the Palantir team to see some of the innovative uses of the product. When your users are surprising and delighting you with the depth and quality of analysis they’re presenting back to you, you know you’re building and selling the right platform to truly change the way that people relate to data.

We’re witnessing the end of the data age and the first sparks of the age of analysis.

I often ask candidates if they’re familiar with what we do at Palantir. Most people think they are. “Oh, you’re that data viz. company,” or, worse, “You guys do data mining, right?” At least they’ve heard of us and at least they’re on the right track, but I cringe anyway. We aren’t just a “data visualization” company and we don’t do “data mining.” It’s almost impossible to convey the scope and complexity of what we do in a few short minutes—or to do so without taking the conversation to an eye-glazing level of abstraction.

The following is my attempt at describing what we do at a high level without oversimplifying. I hope that after reading this a candidate will ‘get’ what we’re about, or at least understand enough not to apply tiny labels to our expansive vision.

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