Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Neal Creighton, CEO of CounterTack (Part 1)

Have you wondered what if cyber criminals could be tracked down and convicted like regular criminals? Very interesting discussion on that related issues, as well as possible entrepreneurial opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background about yourself as well as CounterTack.

Neal Creighton: I’m the President and CEO of CounterTack, which is a cyber security company. I’ve been in cyber security for about 18 to 20 years now. This is my fifth cyber company. All venture-backed. A couple of those companies are with Semantic now and one is owned by Trend Micro. CounterTack has a very big value proposition. We’ve been around for six years or so and have about 100 employees. We’ve raised $70 million or so in total. We are one of the leading companies trying to solve the problem of all these threats attacking major corporations that you read about in the newspapers these days, whether they’re State-sponsored, activist groups, or criminal elements.

We’re trying to protect the laptops, work stations, and servers inside the enterprise that are very vulnerable today as they’re using old technology to protect those particular targets. That’s our focus. We are all over the world now. We are growing very rapidly and I think we are in a very important space. We only have a few competitors chasing us in the space. There’s a lot of investment and innovation happening in cyber security. We suspect that’s going to continue for quite some time.

Sramana Mitra: I want to double-click down on one thing you said in this introduction, which is perfect. There is a lot of old technology today protecting enterprise servers and laptops. Can you talk about the kinds of technologies that you are replacing?

Neal Creighton: What everyone’s familiar with is anti-virus technology, which would be a McAfee that runs on your computer that looks for malware. We’re all dealing with that. The truth of the matter is, that technology was designed many years ago to stop known threats. What I mean by that is it takes a fingerprint of a piece of malware or virus and when it sees it, it tries to stop it from coming and infecting machines. Today, there are so many tools for an attacker to use to disguise the virus or malware. They’re either creating brand new ones that anti-virus would have never seen before. It would go right through that and on to the machine, or they’re encrypting and morphing the actual virus itself so that it looks different.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Neal Creighton, CEO of CounterTack
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