Categories
Entrepreneurship

Introducing ThreatDown: A new chapter for Malwarebytes

Since I started Malwarebytes 15 years ago the threat landscape has changed. Our offerings have evolved. And now the next chapter of our journey begins today.

How did we get here?

My first cyber “combatant” was an early form of adware running amok on my family’s computer. Removing it was a team effort, and it led to the creation of the first iteration of Malwarebytes, a free tool built to help everyday people find and remove malware from their computers, without needing to scour forums, write code, or run scripts like I had.

Malwarebytes turned out to be extremely popular. It did what no other product could, find malware and remove every trace. Although designed as a free tool for individuals, IT professionals downloaded it in droves. The vast amount of malware infections that common AV tools missed proved that organizations needed better detection as well as our remediation.  

Malwarebytes for Business was born.  

Organizations today must protect against more than malware. There are ransomware gangs, crypto-scammers, Advanced Persistent Threat groups, data exfiltration and extortion schemes, big-money exploits, disastrous zero-days, brute force attacks, Living-Off-the-Land techniques—that anti-virus detection doesn’t find—and fast evolving social engineering tactics that will only advance with the broad availability of generative AI.  

But with the rapid increase of attack surfaces, security products have multiplied and become increasingly complex to deploy and manage. Many IT organizations are struggling with the number of consoles and increasing costs. Most don’t have enough cybersecurity staff or budget to take down threat levels. 

For more than a decade, Malwarebytes has provided resource constrained IT organizations with the necessary tools to stop cybercriminals across the entire threat spectrum—from attack surface reduction; through prevention, detection, and response; to remediation. Time and time again our products are tested, proven, and recognized, year after year, quarter after quarter. Importantly, we’ve also made security simpler. Delivered in one lightweight agent, using one console, IT organizations can manage thousands of endpoints and vast security capabilities at once.  

Today, we launch a name that reflects the full scope of our business product line, the serious daily battle with adversaries on behalf of organizations, and embodies our mission – security that overpowers threats, not IT.    

I want to personally introduce you to “ThreatDown, powered by Malwarebytes.” The ThreatDown platform is focused on the problem we heard about most from our corporate customers, institutions and partners. No, not securing the software supply chain, cracking down on zero-day vulnerabilities, or stopping the growing spate of ransomware attacks (though all of those also rank high in importance).  

The biggest problem, simply enough, is complexity.  

For too long, even the most well-intentioned cybersecurity vendors and researchers have issued security recommendations in a vacuum, assuming every business has the same budget, staff size, and IT resources. Under this guise, the products our industry has sold are hardly “solutions”—they are proposals.  

We know this isn’t working for most organizations.  

According to IDC, 60 percent of mid-market companies only have 1 – 4 full time IT people, making complex integrations, installations, or management of tech tools formidable. Similar research also shows that a simple configuration change could take IT teams a few hours, while more complex changes can take several days or even weeks, and that companies deploy an average of 55 different cybersecurity tools—each with their own cloud-based console, agent, and management requirements.  

ThreatDown understands that meaningful cybersecurity “solutions” must consider an organization’s ability to implement and embrace a security product and its toolset. This is why the ThreatDown portfolio isn’t a list of individual products for organizations to figure out.  

Today we’re also launching four ThreatDown Bundles that combine award-winning layers of protection, threat intelligence, and human expertise for IT-constrained organizations of all sizes and skill levels. These new bundles help organizations take down threats, while also taking down complexity and cost. Every bundle includes our Security Advisor, which provides a security score to illustrate a company’s current level of protection, offers guidance on how to make improvements and enables IT to take immediate action. 

This is just the beginning.    

Fifteen years ago, with enormous help from around the world, we started something special with Malwarebytes. Today, we are doing that again. 

Join me as we overpower threats and empower IT together.  

Visit www.threatdown.com to learn more.  

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Why your chief executive should wear a hoodie

In the early days of a startup, once your company achieved scale, the technical founder would step back to be replaced with a “professional chief executive”.

This used to be commonplace; everyone from Cisco to eBay went through the management team merry-go-round.

But the tide is turning and there is a growing acceptance that the guy in the hoodie who wrote the code has a unique set of skills that can translate into business success.

RUTHLESS OBSESSION

First, such people are relentlessly fussy about the quality of their products and services. Show me an engineer who is happy to cut corners and I will show you a liar.

Years spent ruthlessly obsessing about the position of a button instils a strong sense of perfectionism.

In a transient world where customer loyalty is everything, meticulous product development is all. All the marketing money in the world cannot replace a poorly built product or service.

RELENTLESS TINKERING

This leads into the second reason why technical co-founders are valuable: we are never happy to sit still.

In a world where business cycles are shortening all the time, if the guy at the top isn’t a relentless tinkerer, then you will be left behind.

This is something that is increasingly true across the board, not just in the tech industry.

The abundance of “labs” and “innovation centres” in everything from the car to the pharma industry is a sign of this.

A willingness to play around with business models and improve legacy processes, often using technical skills as an instigating factor, is tearing down the walls at companies that have dominated for years.

It’s certainly not an overstatement to say that an engineer with a curious mind can build something that in a few years will be eating everyone’s lunch.

Look at Travis Kalanick at Uber, a software engineer sitting atop a six-year-old company that is rewriting all kinds of markets.

This willingness to experiment is a personality trait hard-wired into technical professionals.

CALCULATED RISK

A calculated approach to evaluating risk – and the associated decision-making – is the third area where a technical background can really help a chief executive.

Years of basing decisions on data and gradually iterating products through analytics removes the emotional response.

With more information available to management teams nowadays, this ingrained problem-solving instinct can make the difference between a successful venture and a costly one.

Of course, it’s not all about perfectly calculated business decisions. I will happily hold my hand up to the fact that there are many areas where those with a non-technical background are absolutely crucial.

Until I figure out how to automate the creative and interpersonal skills required by sales and marketing, for example, I am happy to leave this to a specialist team!

This raises an important point, however. I am a strong believer in the benefits of having a technical co-founder in the top spot, as their innate abilities really make a difference.

But in order to realise this value, it is vital to collaborate closely with those who have complementary skills. Every hoodie needs a suit, each Steve Jobs needs a Steve Wozniak.

Note: This is a byline I wrote for City A.M.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Best advice I’ve ever been given

“Marry the believers, divorce the naysayers.”

My CFO said that when I first met him; it’s what his previous CEO used to tell him. Get the wrong people off of the bus and keep the right people on. Unfortunately, this advice is hard to follow most of the time.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Location, location, location!

Sounds like something a real estate agent would shout at you while selling you a house, right? Well, sort of.

Just like a grocer may perform a location survey to determine the best place for their store, i.e. the corner versus in a back alley, as an entrepreneur starting a business it is absolutely critical to choose your location. And I don’t mean your office location, I mean your niche. I hate calling it a niche, because it implies something small. Uber certainly didn’t find anything small when it chose to redefine how calling a taxi works!

We faced this hurdle at Malwarebytes early on. When we built the product almost eight years ago, antivirus companies had already saturated the market. There was no room for another antivirus, not that we wanted to be one anyway. From the very beginning, we decided to position ourselves as another layer of protection, one that focuses on the most aggressive and unknown threats and we left the rest to antivirus. It was one of the best decisions we had ever made.

At the time, we had no idea the position (location!) was so important. The revelation came to me recently while reading The Granularity of Growth where the author’s research found that “a company’s choice of where to compete is almost four times more important than outperforming within its market.” Had we positioned ourselves as another antivirus, who knows what Malwarebytes would be today.