Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Neal Creighton, CEO of CounterTack (Part 2)

Neal Creighton: There are some good statistics that anti-virus stops only 50% only of the attacks. Most of those are mass and junk threats. The rest gets through. Of the very dangerous attacks that we’re reading about on other retailers and government agencies, it stops pretty much zero of those types of attacks and yet we’re still relying on it. There’s a big change in the industry right now to try and pick up the threats that haven’t been seen before. We have to do that through different techniques than what anti-viruses use. We’re in the middle of a pretty large shift where the anti-virus technology, I believe, will go away. It’s still relevant. It’s still useful in some capacity. To stop new types of attacks we need different technology. That’s where we play and that’s where some of our competitors play.

Sramana Mitra: Essentially, you are providing something that replaces anti-viruses. That’s the crux of what you said?

Neal Creighton: That’s our eventual goal. Right now, we’re focused on letting the anti-virus keep out the mass viruses that are not trying to do damage other than bog down machines, and focus on the state-sponsored or criminal elements that are trying to steal data that are much more sophisticated. We are running in conjunction with anti-virus today, but eventually we see moving out and replacing that, and adding that component to our product. No one wants to have multiple products installed. We are serving alongside today, but probably tomorrow, we see it converging.

Sramana Mitra: Help me with an ecosystem map. Who are the other players whom you are competing with for the same kind of deals?

Neal Creighton: Most of the players in the space are not household names. The ones we know are McAfee and Symantec. They’ve been very slow to innovate in the space. It’s what happens to large companies. It’s hard to maneuver fast enough in new markets. They’ve been struggling in this area. There have been a few companies. If you look at security, there have been a lot of financing in the past year. CounterTack is one of the leading companies. I think the leading company in the space, but there’s other companies like CrowdStrike which received $100 million from Google Capital just this year. There are companies that are not yet public like Carbon Black which has raised a lot of money. There’s a variety of different players in that space. We do have our eyes on the old players but we have not seen innovation from them, but they’re always a threat.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Neal Creighton, CEO of CounterTack
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