For cybersecurity startup ZeroNorth, this summer has been an eventful one. The company raised $10 million in a Series A investment in April, its founder Ernesto DiGiambattista took a backseat as a board member and chairman and the startup welcomed two key hires to its C-suite. John Steven, former co-CTO at Cigital, joined as CTO, and John Worrall, former CMO of CyberArk, took over as the new CEO.
Founded in 2015, ZeroNorth provides risk-based orchestration system. As CEO Worrall explains it, there are two general categories of solutions in security: proactive controls, where a business monitors malicious activity to prevent it from becoming a full-blown cyberattack, and reactive controls, where organizations look at audit logs to see if something wasn’t caught. ZeroNorth's software makes proactive tools more efficient.
BostInno spoke to the newly inducted CEO for a quick tête-à-tête to catch up on his first order of business, the company's future and challenges for the industry.
What’s first on your agenda as CEO of ZeroNorth?
We are seeing incredible growth and our primary goals are to continue building a product that will be valuable to our customers and second is to put a lot of emphasis on scaling the business and growing the team so we are able to support the growth and opportunities that are out there. That means hiring people with expertise, customer success and making sure to instill the right culture in the company.
What are the challenges companies face when it comes to cybersecurity? What’s the top three items on their priority list with security?
Every organization is now a software business. You have General Motors that’s now a software business, Caterpillar is another one. We live in a software-defined world and our societies and economies will be vulnerable to software attacks and as companies go through digital transformation, they need to make sure security keeps pace with software development. There are attacks we know about and we haven’t done a good job of mitigating those vulnerabilities and then there are new unknown attack factors that are evolving constantly. We have to wait and see and be agile enough to respond quickly to those attacks. And there is the universal challenge in cybersecurity of labor shortage — there isn’t enough cybersecurity talent out there.
You’ve been an advisor and mentor to early-stage cybersecurity companies - are there any innovative solutions that have caught your attention?
Technologies that are investing in analytics are interesting to watch — machine learning in cybersecurity is one. It’s an enabling technology that can be applied to a number of cybersecurity solutions across a range of categories. Identity systems like blockchain is also interesting to look at. Bitcoin might get all the press but blockchain technology can be transformational in business and security applications. Password replacement is another interesting area to watch.
We have seen hackers outsmart security tools and get sophisticated with hacks, where do you think we will see this next?
Attackers will go wherever the technology leads them. If organizations are deploying new applications, that’s where attackers will go. Jetfighters are software-based, Tesla cars are software-based and every time software makes its way into our lives in ways that it never has before, that becomes an attack target for hackers. At Defcon, there was a demonstration where a group of attackers who, with the blessing of DoD, hacked into the control systems of F-15 fighter jets. How’s that for a scary scenario?
On the heels of the new funding and new leadership, what’s 2019 looking like for the company and what areas will you be in hiring in?
2019 is looking great, and so is 2020. That’s the reason we’re expanding. We’re getting close to 30 employees and you will see ZeroNorth hiring in engineering, product development, customer success and sales.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
