Celebrating 10 Years!

We incorporated the company in mid-2015 and this year we got to celebrate ten years in the making. This article is centered around the first three (3) years of the company and market conditions at the time. Our idea started as a belief that the personal security consumer product market (e.g. AV, IDS, IPS) was segregated not benefitting from the enterprise security market innovations over the past decade but ironically this is where an influx of these cheap IoT devices were being put in homes. The everyday consumer didn’t understand what a problem this was going to cause for security and privacy protection.

2015 IoT Market Context: The IoT landscape in 2015 was explosive. IBM had famously projected 1 trillion connected devices by 2015_[1], while more conservative estimates from Gartner placed the number at 6.4 billion IoT devices (excluding smartphones and tablets)_[2]. McKinsey Global Institute’s landmark 2015 report “The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype” projected that IoT could generate $3.9 to $11.1 trillion in economic value annually by 2025_[3]. The consumer smart home segment was particularly vulnerable—HP’s Fortify study found 70% of IoT devices contained serious vulnerabilities_[4], yet these cheap devices rarely received security updates and were being deployed without any network-level protection.

The answer wasn’t to bring a next-gen AV or next-gen consumer EDR, we thought a single device they could install at their edge and have it protect everything within their home is the answer, but it always had to be easy. More on this in a few paragraphs.

The market conditions in 2015 created a perfect storm for home network security innovation. Consumer IoT adoption was accelerating while always-on broadband became ubiquitous. As enterprise security hardened, attackers increasingly targeted the softer residential perimeter. Media coverage was raising consumer awareness, and the workforce mobility trend meant corporate data was flowing through unprotected home networks. Critically, consumers demonstrated willingness to purchase hardware solutions and the component ecosystem had matured enough to support cost-effective device manufacturing.

Gartner’s hype cycle at the time estimated the industry was at the peak of inflated expectations around IoT, but security would be a booming market as realities settled in. Note: Highlights in the image are ours from 2015.

The FBI was also helping by attempting to educate the consumer market that this is real:

Security expert Bruce Schneier captured the core issue: “IoT devices can’t be patched like desktop and mobile operating systems. In many cases, the mechanism is nonexistent...These are install-and-forget products, and many ‘things’ such as fridges and cars will not be replaced for a long time. This means they’ll remain vulnerable for the rest of their lives.”_[5]

However, there are no truly new ideas—and that became evident when we surveyed the competitive landscape. Looking back at our 2015 pitch deck, several companies were pursuing similar visions:

• F-Secure Sense
• Bitdefender Box
• dojo Labs (acquired by Bullguard)
• CUJO (now Cujo.ai) (acquired by Comcast)
• nodal (acquired by Luma)

You might have noticed that our subscription model was ‘lifetime’. This was a great decision for consumers, a terrible one for us. We did this originally with great intent: consumers already have subscription fatigue, let’s not add to that with one more. We still have customers with lifetime units connected and benefiting from our architecture and infrastructure. When we set out to build the device, our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was around four central categories:

At the time, several companies were trying to tackle this problem through asinine methods (specifically calling out ARP spoofing). It is still difficult to imagine companies actually released products that did this and thought it was a good idea. It was a complete failure. They eventually pivoted to more traditional router-based approaches after market rejection.

Our design was fundamentally different and we created some prototypes very early on in 2015 that have continued to stand the test of time. Those software prototypes led us to an inline style custom hardware device with proprietary technology.

Namely two of the technologies we’ll refer to as: Surreptitious IP Assignment and Port Position Independence. We plan to dive deeper into those technologies in future articles. These were intentional and felt like a necessity for the average home consumer. For example, when someone installs the device between their modem and router, which port and cable goes where? It doesn’t matter. Also, no need to register the new MAC or renew/release an IP assignment for a new device added inline, we made it completely transparent so the ISP or headend technology doesn’t know it’s there. This technology won us the Grand Security Award for Innovation by Popular Science. Excited to expand upon these technologies in future articles.

Eventually we adapted the core technology and expanded into the Router market with our SimpliNET2 brand - this removes the transparent edge, but brought forward a very reliable mesh network for its time (2017) paired with our RATtrap security agent processing.

Looking Ahead

Ten years of protecting home networks has taught us that the threat landscape never stops evolving—and neither do we. As IoT devices continue to proliferate and remote work becomes the norm, the need for simple, effective home network security has never been greater.

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Here’s to the next decade of keeping your home network safe.

References

[1] IBM, “A Smarter Planet” initiative projections, 2010

[2] Gartner, “Gartner Says 6.4 Billion Connected ‘Things’ Will Be in Use in 2016, Up 30 Percent From 2015,” November 2015

[3] McKinsey Global Institute, “The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype,” June 2015

[4] HP Fortify, “Internet of Things Research Study,” July 2014

[5] Bruce Schneier, “The Internet of Things Is Wildly Insecure — And Often Unpatchable,” Wired, January 2014