14 DAY TRIAL // The NSA has released a batch of tools codenamed SIMP (Systems Integrity Management Tool) on a special GitHub account set up just for this, and following their Technology Transfer Program (TTP).
According to the NSA press release, "SIMP keeps networked systems compliant with given security standards."
This means that the Systems Integrity Management Tool works on as a boilerplate for various security products, helping developers implement safe security protocols following best industry practices and taking advantage of the NSA's experience in protecting their servers from various hacking attempts.
Linda Burger, director of the NSA Technology Transfer Program, said, “The open-source software method of transferring technology from the federal laboratory to the marketplace is extremely efficient,” hoping to convey an openness to collaboration and invite as many developers to participate in developing these tools even further.
The NSA inviting companies to adopt some of their tools should not surprise anyone at this point, as US companies are many times the most frequent targets in foreign-originated hacking attempts, many of them coming from China and North Korea.
Almost all the tools are coded in Ruby, and the NSA decided to releases them on GitHub due to the platform's appeal to modern-day coders and the excellent community collaboration tools it comes integrated with.
This is not the first time the NSA has released open-source tools
If you think the NSA releasing open-source software is odd, then don't, because this is not the first time they've done it.
The NSA previously published two other open-source projects, both of which were adopted by the Apache Software Foundation, one of them having been upgraded to a Top-Level project a few years ago.
The first one was Apache Accumulo, an NoSQL database engine supporting a sorted, distributed key-value storage and retrieval system, currently widely used among many companies around the world.
The second was Apache NiFi, a project aimed at providing a way to manage data flows and data routes inside a cluster of servers, optimizing and increasing processing power & speed.
This is still an Incubator-level project at Apache, but when finished, it will allow organizations to process data sent through large, geographically distributed networks, where information is exchanged in different formats and protocols.