Penetration Testing and Network Vulnerability Assessment Company Noted for its Product Innovation

Boston, Massachusetts (PRWEB) October 24, 2013

Pwnie Express, the leading provider of rapid deployment remote security assessment products, today announced that its Pwn Pad won the prestigious 7th annual Vermont Tech Jam Innovation Award.

Pwnie Express provides cost effective, rapid deployment security assessment products comprised of innovative sensors that make it incredibly easy to evaluate risk in remote and distributed environments. These hard-to-reach distributed areas of an organization provide today’s high-risk attack paths for cyber adversaries and rogue devices.

“We are honored that the Vermont Technology Alliance recognized the Pwn Pad for its innovation and simple approach to creating smart devices that leverage the use of open source tools and platforms,” said Paul Paget, Pwnie Express CEO. “This award further attests to our ability to provide enterprises visibility into attack activity and risk on their wired and wireless networks.”

More than a 1000 enterprises across verticals including retail, finance, health, and manufacturing as well as service providers and government organizations rely on Pwnie Express to know who and what is accessing their networks. Pwnie Express’ products come in a variety of form factors including the Tech Jam Award recipient Pwn Pad, as well as the Pwn Plug, the Power Pwn and Pwnie’s groundbreaking enterprise product that provides unprecedented visibility via a centralized console assimilating the data from the various devices.

The Vermont Technology Alliance said in a statement: “Pwnie Express is known for taking “black hat” hacker tools and packaging them in a creative way for “white hat” use, helping government and corporate entities protect their systems from attack. Their new Pwn Pad packs the company’s proven penetration-testing software into the body of a Nexus Table.”

Headquartered in Massachusetts, Pwnie Express’s Research and Development (R&D) and manufacturing operations are in Vermont.

About Pwnie Express

Pwnie Express is the leading provider of innovative sensors that assess network security risks in remote locations. Thousands of enterprises and government organizations worldwide rely on Pwnie Express’s products to conduct drop-box penetration testing and provide unprecedented insight into their distributed network infrastructure. Pwnie Express’s smart devices leverage open source tools and platforms. The award-winning products are backed by the expertise of Pwnie Labs, the company’s security research arm.

 

Company continues aggressive push to scale social media opportunities for enterprise marketers

 

New York, October 16, 2013 – Today SocialFlow, the premier social media marketing company, announced that it has extended its support of Twitter advertising into its Forte product to allow for the simple, timely promotion of high-performing Tweets.

 

“We think it’s important to be able to bridge the gap between social media managers and media buyers,” said Jim Anderson, CEO of SocialFlow. “Today’s launch makes it that much easier for social media managers to be timely and relevant with paid messaging on Twitter.  And a great place to start with your paid messaging is with the Tweets that have already resonated with your audience.”

 

SocialFlow Forte can work as a standalone product or alongside any other social media management solution, by recommending which Tweets are candidates for investment. By understanding the potential appetite for a given Tweet, SocialFlow Forte alerts users that there is a real-time opportunity to see success by promoting that Tweet.  With just one click, Forte segments the targeting criteria and allocates budget. By removing the most manual and labor-intensive pieces of a process that requires speed in execution in order to be successful in connecting with the audience, SocialFlow has once again changed the way that value is realized on social media marketing platforms.

 

SocialFlow launched Forte for Facebook earlier this year, and many clients have already used it to promote their Facebook posts.  The company was selected as a Twitter Ads API partner in June and immediately began work on integrating and extending their platform.

 

Frank Speiser, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of SocialFlow notes, “If an audience is not inclined to pay attention, they aren’t going to pay attention. There are immense commercial opportunities in social, but those networks work on people-centric principles, you have to share well in order to matter. Our first product, Cadence Optimized Publisher, is clearly the best publishing solution on the market, and is used by the most successful companies sharing to social today. We know how to win on the social graph, and we applied those key findings to Forte. Paid media absolutely needs to be relevant. You are sharing to an audience, which is a complex problem in its own right, but in these cases you’re sharing to people who may not have elected to directly follow you. You are a guest in their feed, and you are likely competing for their attention with Tweets that come from sources they have chosen to connect with. If you’re going to win that comparison, you need to relevant. When you do win, however, your upside is tremendous. Our products can do this for you.”

 

About SocialFlow

SocialFlow is the premier social marketing optimization technology company that enables the world’s most powerful brands to drive superior results connecting their earned, owned and paid media strategies. Powered by high-performance, proprietary technology and predictive data analytics, the company offers a full suite of services that expand audience engagement and seamlessly integrates businesses goals with a company’s social media strategy. Founded in 2009, New York based SocialFlow works with numerous well-respected brands and publishers such as Stuart Weitzman, Pepsi, Burberry, Forbes, Walmart, and The New York Times. To learn more about SocialFlow, please visit us at www.socialflow.com.

 

 

 

Fairhaven Capital, Goldman Sachs and Private Investors Fund CounterTack’s Rapid Growth and Expansion to Help Organizations Address Persistent Cyber Threats

CounterTack today announced it has closed a $12 million Series B round of funding, supported by Goldman Sachs, Fairhaven Capital and a group of private investors. The funding will help CounterTack to support its accelerated go-to-market strategy and global expansion in the endpoint threat detection and response market.

“We are excited about our series B which includes Goldman Sachs, Fairhaven Capital and our private investors,” said Neal Creighton, CEO of CounterTack. “The market has shown tremendous interest in our approach to securing enterprise endpoints and defending against highly targeted and persistent attacks. As a result of our momentum, we are currently oversubscribed, with the potential for CounterTack to receive additional funding in this round.”

CounterTack’s Sentinel and Scout solutions provide real-time threat detection and visibility into attacker behaviors. This visibility enables CounterTack to rapidly detect and analyze threats on individual endpoints throughout a customer’s organization, and correlate threats enterprise-wide, to identify attack characteristics and motives to better defend against them.

“We are seeing an explosive opportunity in the endpoint security market worldwide,” said Mark Hatfield, partner at Fairhaven Capital. “CounterTack’s innovative approach to detecting and analyzing threats on desktop, laptop and server endpoints positions the company to become the next meaningful security technology to the global enterprise. As the threat landscape has evolved, so has CounterTack, keeping the company and its customers ahead of persistent attackers.”

CounterTack continues to gain international attention for its Scout and Sentinel products. In August 2013, the company announced a new partnership with SK Infosec, a large South Korean information security provider. Under the partnership agreement, CounterTack’s Sentinel will play a critical role in countering the ongoing cyber attacks that South Korean organizations face everyday.

 

More and more these days we are hearing about powerful analytics that are making there way from the world of big data to the hands of IT users in the form of automated products. While some IT pros still maintain these analytics ‘can’t do anything I can’t do’ we should agree thatanomaly detection analytics can do what humans would do but fast enough to handle millions of analyses per minute spanning thousands of data fields. I haven’t met the human yet that could do that!

How do you know if you would benefit from anomaly detection analytics? Let me posit that if you have one of the following three symptoms (OK there are a lot more but those are the subject of future blog posts) you could be a hero to your organization by downloading one of these products.

Symptom 1 : You have more data coming at you than you can get your head around.

Network devices, servers, apps, middleware and the myriad assortment of IT stuff we have surrounded ourselves with generate a lot of more data than most IT shops can handle. Back in the day when this first started to become obvious, a novel approach was designed to deal with it that we have been living with ever since. The working theory went something like

‘all that data is mostly meaningless so we can cherry pick the most important nuggets and monitor those’.

Thus evolved the working process of choosing KPI (Key Performance Indicators) and setting thresholds on them. These thresholds generated alerts that were accompanied by rules as to when not to trigger them. These alerts are great in telling that something is wrong. The problem is that they often don’t tell you enough to find a cause.

Anomaly detection analytics allows users to monitor huge swaths of data beyond just KPI. They baseline normal behaviors and relationships between components so when a problem arises, they’ve already identified the cause.

Symptom 2 : Your environment generates thousands of alarms a day.

Of course this isn’t very helpful and most teams stuck in this dilemma realize there is little value in getting more alerts than you can reasonably respond to.

There are two ways anomaly detection analytics solve this problem. First, they generate far fewer, and more accurate alerts. They have this little nuance of looking for anomalies and scoring them by severity, rarity and impact on other related metrics or log fields. That means conditions that would normally generate repeated alerts because they are normal no longer trigger alerts. Even conditions that are abnormal but have no impact on say the related end user response time won’t trigger alerts.

Symptom 3 : You don’t monitor in real-time and are purely reactive

This is a common condition that often has no relationship to lack of interest in being proactive. Some environments are so dynamic or complex that it is impossible to set realistic thresholds and KPI are continuously changing.

Contrary to popular opinion, anomaly detection analytics are well suited for these environments. This of course is only true if the ‘learning’ methodology is flexible. Systems that require weeks of training will often need re-training and are horribly inadequate in dynamic environments. DevOps users have recently been experimenting with anomaly detection analytics with great results.

If any of these symptoms sound familiar, do a search on ‘anomaly detection analytics’ and find a product you can download and test easily in your environment.