“Let’s never write security software. There are too many gotchas, too many players, too much risk.”
This was the sentiment expressed by our team in the early days; back when we were living in too small of a house a few miles from the University of Connecticut, while working on completing our degrees. Data visualization was limited, the “Cloud” was just a twinkle in marketing’s eye, Netflix only delivered DVDs, and we would make another pot of coffee as the clock ticked past midnight. Typical concerns for a college computer science student.
After a few years we were fortunate enough to still all be good friends; we had jobs in IT Security and were settling into our adult lives. We collectively decided that things were too easy for us, we quickly addressed that by submitting a proposal to Cyber Fast Track (CFT) program. In our day-to-day work we realized that the smattering of security tools available to us were utterly lacking, slow to produce meaningful results, and circumvented constantly. It was frustrating for us to spend large amounts of time attempting to analyze memory images so we decided to perform some research (get paid for it along the way).
Extending the foundations of virtual machine introspection (VMI) we attempted to turn the basics into something tangible and approachable by organizations and developers. As it turns out VMI is hard, harder still to do properly in enterprise settings. We had to develop many unique ways to handle where our software lives. Looking into physical memory and understanding what is going on required new tools, processes, and code generation techniques.
So here it was, a solution to our ease, a project which had us watching the clock tick past midnight and the coffee flowing into the wee morning hours. Our free time consumed with development. Although a trying with the help of the libvmi project, its community, and a great deal of sweat equity and trust from those around us we have proudly been able to bring our technology to market.
At Zentific we have always been interested in solving (and creating) interesting problems, finding our own questions when googling for issues, and discovering how software can help people complete their jobs more effectively. For us, that is what really matters; we have been in the trenches, we have had to work around the inadequacies of the tools in an industry which is in constant flux and ever growing importance.
We are excited to see our tools and solutions evolve and hope that you will join us along the way.
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