Blocking Ransomware at the Hard Drive Level: John Benkert, CEO of Cigent (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You retired from the Air Force and decided to do your own company.

John Benkert: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What were you going to offer and to whom?

John Benkert: It still exists today. It’s called CPR Tools. It’s a data recovery company. It stands for Certified Professional Recovery. We do a lot of hard data recovery. If you see on the news where maybe a bad guy does something and their data is unrecoverable, that’s what we specialize in. We certainly do the everyday stuff. Another part of our company gets rid of data. That’s where a lot of this comes from.

Sramana Mitra: You do these as services projects?

John Benkert: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You have two companies then – CPR Tools and Cigent.

John Benkert: Cigent was born out of CPR Tools. I came to work for CPR Tools. The company was actually started in 1987. I came there for training back in 1997 to learn how to do data recovery. I ended up working for the company in 2004 and then purchased the company in 2011.

What we did was give it a new focus. It was really focusing on being a government contractor in the early years. When I purchased it, I said I wanted to do much more than that. Even though ransomware started back in the late 80s, it wasn’t prominent like it is today.

I wanted to protect people’s data when they travel. I travel a lot. I carry my laptop with me. I wanted to be sure that when my laptop is in that hotel safe, it is safe. That’s where it started. Since I owned a company that did hard drives and storage media, I went to the engineers and said, “I want to start protecting people’s data. The best place to do it is from the hard drive because that’s where the data is.”

We decided to create a thumb drive. This was 2014. We made a flash drive. We made it to understand how flash works. It took us about three and a half months to build this little flash drive. It worked. We could sell them, but that wasn’t my goal. The goal was to get into the solid-state hard drive. We did that in about seven months.

We purchased IP. We didn’t have the money to do that from scratch. I went to brands and said, “We made this. This is how it protects data.” They introduced us to InQTel. InQTel said they were interested, so we did a spinout company called Cigent.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Blocking Ransomware at the Hard Drive Level: John Benkert, CEO of Cigent
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