In the mid 2000’s, there was no urgency to buy security products; the threat was mostly vandalism and some crime, and the mentality was a “peace-time” mentality. From a customer perspective, it was typically a compliance, and protect your reputation, purchase that could always be delayed for the next quarter. The vendors’ offerings, too, were plain vanilla in terms of tools, approaches, and background of teams (mostly from the data networking world).
Sometime in the early 2010’s, this all changed. Much more dangerous actors, who were well financed, trained by governments, and experienced in cyber warfare, started to emerge in the commercial market. We started to see sophisticated, very damaging attacks that changed the game to a “war-time” mentality: while it is one thing to be embarrassed by a defaced website, it is a totally different problem to lose your entire country’s grid (for example, Ukraine in summer 2015), and face the danger of a nuclear reactor melt down, the collapse of financial exchanges, etc., from cyber attacks.
Even if the adversary’s goal is “just money”, corporations have no match to the level of sophistication and determination of those bad actors. Soon the level of urgency to address these problems increased, with much bigger budgets, and awareness at the board and CEO level, not just at the IT level.
This signaled a renewed opportunity in security.
However, true cyber security represents war-time thinking. We are looking for founders with that type of thinking: with clandestine training and experience, who bring a totally fresh perspective informed by their intelligence-community experiences, and who use tools never before seen in “digital/peace-time” security. We are looking for “war-time” teams developing cyber security products and approaches.
Please contact Izhar Armony if you are interested.
