Joining a new company - it’s always an adjustment in many respects. And joining a new startup? That also requires some shifting of your mindset. And for many reasons, depending on how early or even late-stage the venture is.
However, one thing that one of my mentors always said to me was, ‘You have to be vested in the problem you're trying to solve. Remember why you’re there.’
The older I get, the more important the is, and it’s not just believing in a mission statement either - it’s about applying the innovation, skill, domain expertise and the critical thinking that you believe in to challenge the status quo, and grow a company into something great.
I’m happy to announce that I have joined VulnCheck as Chief Marketing Officer, to help bring visibility and validation to our brand, to support customer growth and to help deliver exceptional security research insights to the market in many forms.
What we’re building at VulnCheck is unlike any other company in how we identify potentially exploitable vulnerabilities with speed and precision that is simply not possible anywhere else. The energy, the collaboration and the quick path to innovating is palpable and we are going to take the cybersecurity world by storm!
What’s exciting is that today we announced new members of our leadership team, all of whom have incredible experience in building successful cybersecurity ventures. You can read the announcement here. And you can check out our snazzy new leadership team section here, compliments of Kevin Olson!
Because we couldn’t fit it all into the press release, each new team member has supplied a reason for joining VulnCheck. And I’ll just say it - with this experienced, domain-savvy team of all-stars, we're well-positioned for growth, scale ad most importantly, helping the cybersecurity ecosystem get better and faster in defending businesses worldwide!
Our Team’s Perspectives
“Having driven product strategy and development in the security product market for decades, I leapt at the opportunity to come aboard after learning about VulnCheck’s market differentiating offerings. Their key differentiators in Exploit Intelligence and Initial Access Intelligence to better assist enterprises hunt and defense efforts are unparalleled and they are leaps and bounds beyond other’s efforts.”
“Before joining VulnCheck, I had the opportunity to demo the product, and I was blown away by the quantity and quality of the intelligence. I'd seen nothing like it before. I was already enthusiastic about the product when Anthony and I began discussing how I might fit into the company. Our discussions resulted in a complementary new product called "Initial Access Intelligence" which contains closed-source intelligence generated by VulnCheck researchers. On the strength of VulnCheck's open source intelligence, with the additional unique insights from our closed-source intelligence, I knew VulnCheck was destined to become a force in the market.”
“I’m excited about the opportunity with VulnCheck because we’re doing something that no one else is doing, and it is a true game-changer for the entire cybersecurity universe. VulnCheck is rewriting the playbook on vulnerability and exploit intelligence, and is helping customers increase the velocity and vulnerability validity to detect threats that matter.”
“In my career in security, valuable intelligence was always very short lived and palimpsest. Value was only revealed with context that you had to build or join with other data sets. VulnCheck brings context to intelligence and helps the fight against adversaries. This is the data I wanted when I was on the defense. I’m excited to provide a force multiplier to defenders.”
What is Different About VulnCheck?
I’ll come back to the problem we solve, with some context on how we’re solving it, and why I believe this company is going to be the stickiest provider in cyber threat intelligence ecosystem:
The Problem we are Solving As I said above - it’s essential to have a deep belief that the problem you are solving to vest into everything it takes to help in building a sustainable business. The attack landscape, and the ecosystem with which organizations are being targeted has evolved with the pace of digital business.
In other words, for attackers, they’re looking for faster returns and easier yet lucrative outcomes. Whether it’s disruption of critical services or theft - - it’s become essential to modernize how you manage vulnerabilities before they are exploited. The emergence of OSS has really changed the economics and the dynamics of how attackers pluck out vulnerabilities to exploit.
In fact, at Mandiant’s keynote presentation at RSAC in April, they disclosed that 32% of breaches tracked in 2022 were the result of exploits - - that is the first time that the top root source of breaches has NOT been phishing. This means that things are changing and VulnCheck is the right company at the right time to help solve this exact challenge.
Exploits, Not Just Vulnerabilities
Vulnerability management has been a cybersecurity discipline for many years at this point. Not only is it a large market in terms of its market size, but its a critical component of any enterprise SOC or DevSecOps team. But what happens when an attacker randomly selects one of millions of known vulnerabilities and decides to exploit, and that vulnerability is persistent in 90% of software deployed in the enterprise? You have a problem.
Less than 3% of vulnerabilities are ACTUALLY exploited. Why? Its an expensive endeavor to shop, pay for and subsequently build exploits for zero-days. Its a lot cheaper to build exploits for known vulnerabilities. That’s why Log4shell was such a wake-up call that forced national legislation, as well as a number of industry-related regulations.
This is where VulnCheck is leveraging the expertise of some of the foremost security researchers in the world to build a real-time solution that does not require the build-out of scripts against the CISA KEV, featuring 5X more exploits vs any other solution and is building out a way for cybersecurity firms, government agencies and enterprise organizations to automatically enrich detections with the richest data set available.
Again, the excitement in the air at VulnCheck is real, and our growing list of customers are enabling us to build a truly different company that is maniacally focused on changing how organizations are managing vulnerabilities!!!