A Note from Our Founder

I remember my first hack. At 11 years old, I successfully bypassed the copy-protection on an Apple II game — not because I was into software piracy, but because I wanted to see how computer security systems worked. The rush from breaking a system that was designed to be unbreakable was unbearably addicting.

When I graduated high school, I was hired by an oil company and tasked with testing the security of their systems. The rush I felt when I unintentionally crashed their multi-million-dollar mainframe was quite different. I learned very quickly about unintended consequences.

I also remember my first cyber intrusion — the sense of violation, anger, and frustration at not being able to hit back at the attackers. I learned what it was like to get compromised. My second cyber intrusion was much different. As the security officer for an Internet Service Provider, I was able to work with municipal, state, and federal agencies to hunt down the badguys that perpetrated a credit card fraud against our customers. Four months later, the FBI arrested the perpetrators. The rush from victory over the badguys was the best of all.

Later on, I would battle much larger foes tasked with stealing our country's economic and industrial secrets. I learned quickly that you will never win the war, but you can absolutely stick it to the badguys in any given battle.

You will never win the war — but you can absolutely stick it to the badguys in any given battle.

When I founded this company with two police department cyber-crime detectives, we thought the idea of combining law enforcement with cutting-edge technology and techniques might be fun. We could get paid to do a couple of talks, and maybe earn enough to pay for our cell phones (which, back then, were still somewhat of a novelty). Boy, were we wrong.

We discovered quickly how badly businesses, hospitals, schools, legal firms, government agencies, and others needed our help. We developed cutting-edge monitoring techniques to track foreign reconnaissance against critical infrastructure. We disabled logic bombs and built timelines of cyber incidents involving malevolent employees. We even got to confiscate credit card machines off of a jet as it opened its doors at the gate — all of it in the pursuit of protecting our clients.

When I became the sole owner of the company in 2016, we added specific managed services to address the common security pain points we'd seen across every industry for over a decade: log monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and threat detection and response. These tools are super-hard for most businesses to install and run themselves, but they provide the visibility into networks that's critical to mounting an effective cyber defense — and now, cyber resilience. I've lost count of the number of times we've quite literally saved a client from compromise because of these services.

I still get the rush when we defeat the badguys on the wire. My heart also breaks when I get those phone calls on a Friday afternoon at 5:30pm from a college IT administrator whose network has just been torched — and school starts Monday. We're good at cleaning up the messes, and we can hand out hugs in the hallway to little old ladies who are in tears (true story). But we'd much rather help avoid something bad from happening when the badguys come. And they always do. It's only a matter of time before they're at your cyber doorstep, because the Internet is really small even though it spans the globe.

So if you haven't had a recent security assessment, you need specific services, or you just have concerns and want to talk — reach out to us today.