[ISN] Maiffret Starts New Security Venture

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2008 - 02:03:29 PDT


http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=155209

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
Senior Editor
Dark Reading
June 2, 2008

Legendary hacker Marc Maiffret, who started eEye Digital Security when 
he was 17, has launched a new security company. Maiffret's new venture, 
Invenio Security [1], will provide security consulting, training, and 
other security services.

Maiffret, 27, who quietly left eEye last fall, says his startup will 
fill what he sees as a critical gap -- the lack of investment in 
security expertise in organizations. "I have spent the last ten years of 
my life building security products to help protect organizations and 
consumers," Maiffret says. "These products and others are without a 
doubt vital to an organization's security. However, I could not help but 
notice that the number one thing companies continued to under-invest in, 
to dire results, was not products or process but simply, their people." 
(See Maiffret Says Bye to eEye. [2])

Invenio, which Maiffret describes as a boutique consulting firm, will 
provide security consulting and training to medium to large businesses, 
and also provide penetration testing, application security assessments, 
insider threat assessment, incident response, malware analysis, and even 
personal security services for individuals who are the target of online 
stalking or harassment, for example -- think Paris Hilton. [Ed. note: 
No, thank you.]

Maiffret says his firm offers a wide variety of training topics and 
levels. "We train everyone from your average IT administrator to your 
spooky three-letter government agencies," he says. "We have training 
that covers a wide area of topics ranging from teaching IT 
administrators the fundamentals of security and how to defend their 
organization, to classes that in the course of five days will typically 
result in our students discovering a zero-day vulnerability in software 
products used by millions of people."

Maiffret and his team -- one of whom is a former key eEye researcher he 
won't yet name -- will also conduct security research, something 
Maiffret says he's itching to get back into after a bit of a sabbatical. 
"Our research will really be driven by what our customers are interested 
in. Currently that has a lot to do with advancements in black box 
testing and, of course it goes without saying, Web application 
security."

Maiffret practically overnight went from a teen hacker/phone phreaker 
who was raided by the FBI in 1998 to co-founder of eEye, where he 
discovered several critical Windows vulnerabilities in the late 1990s 
and later was part of the team of researchers at eEye that was one of 
the first to detect (and later name) the first major Microsoft worm, 
Code Red. (See From Script Kiddie to CTO. [3])

Invenio, meanwhile, is a departure from Maiffret's software roots at 
eEye. "It is a complete change for me as I have been on the product side 
of security since I was 17," Maiffret says. 

[1] http://www.inveniosecurity.com/
[2] http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=141256 
[3] http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=110772


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