Roman writer Juvenal asked in his Satires: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? [Who watches the watchmen?]"
A glib answer this week would be "the elite of corporate venturing executives" as they attended the presentation by Karim Hijazi, executive president at nascent, US-based cyber-security company Unveillance, at Global Corporate Venturing’s inaugural Tech Scout Challenge.
The corporate venturing groups were certainly impressed by the watchman in this case, as they voted Hijazi’s company the "most investable" among the 15 finallists at the competition, held in partnership with American Security Challgenge.
What they liked was that Unveillance has developed the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) botnet intelligence platform. Leveraging completely passive monitoring, without the use of any on premises hardware, software or agent install, Unveillance’s platform is able to assess whether an organization, country and/or government’s network is actively compromised by malware and thus participating in a botnet infrastructure at a 100% zero false positive rate. What this means is Unveillance’s technology effectively acts as offensive counter-cyber software by tracing where an attack is coming from so it can be targeted in return, rather than relying on traditional defensive measures used by most anti-attack software.
Last year, the US’s Federal Bureau of Investigation described how "in an unprecedented move in the fight against cyber crime, [it] disrupted an international cyber fraud operation by seizing the servers that had infected as many as two million computers with malicious software".
The intelligence platform is able to provide alerting and metrics on severity, frequency and scope of infection as well as display successful remediation efforts.
Management consultants Accenture has worked with Unveillance since it was three months old and is one of the company’s technology partners, alongside strategic partners from the US security services. The US’s intelligence agencies invest in start-ups through the In-Q-Tel quasi-corporate venturing unit and Unveillance’s only public prior funding was almost $632,000 from two undisclosed investors in September.
The company has been looking to partner with more corporations – hence its application to the Tech Scout Challenge – and the challenge was appropriately held at law firm Baker Botts’s office. Of the two leading anti-computer virus providers, private equity-backed Sophos and Intel Capital-backed AVG Technologies, the law firm was counsel on the sale of a majority stake in Sophos to Apax Partners in an $830m unleveraged buyout in early 2010.
Given the importance of security in protecting the internet – or international network of networks after the US’s defence network Arpanet linked up with UK university UCL London node in sending the first transatlanctic data packet in 1973 – it could be Unveillance is on course for similar success.