Saturday, June 18, 2016

...In a market full of rehashed data and carbon copy analysis

Over the past several weeks, and more slowly over the course of every year, we spend a ton of face-to-face time with our customers. And while some come and some go, we still, since day one, maintain more than 90% of the customers that we started with, and those who've left, left because of transfers or they prefer machine-to-machine interactions, some like that --especially those who prefer big data solutions, but...
  • Who do you call when you found a piece of malware and the sandbox doesn't give you enough information?
  • Who do you call when you want more than a list of IP addresses in a blacklist?
  • Or who do you call when you ask your vendor for help, and they only want to sell you a box?
Our customers call us... they have our cell phones. They drop a request in the Red Sky portal, or they send us email... even late at night.

Nearly every intelligence product written comes from a request, sample, or a hint (sometimes subtle and sometimes a club over the head) for something one of our readers needs... now.

This week we had a new company sign up --a large financial. You'd know the name if I told you. They replaced a current service because they needed intel (indicators) from a new piece of malcode and the vendor refused to give them the information --they tried selling them a box... good for us, bad for that vendor.

Another receives daily updates from us --eight different categories of watch lists, monitored by our guys, and fused into one, daily product. They called us at 10PM and asked if we could monitor one of our watch lists for potential fallout from a business issue. We've been monitoring for the last two days.  We love the interaction. And these guys will be customers for life. 

Every customer should feel like an individual. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but we try our best.

As we head into the week, we've got a great lineup for our Threat Day on Tuesday. This one will be held virtually, but we've had a great turnout for signups. As well, we held a Cyber Symposium in Huntsville last week. Between our Huntsville Partner (H2L) and our contacts We invited 100 people. 93 showed. I'd call that a success.

I had to leave early to catch a flight for my talk in Philly but the word was, the best talk (besides mine of course ;) --the one with most conversation (I think mine just scared the hell out of them) was about the DFAR assessments and requirements to report all cyber activity to the government.

That said, we enjoyed the day.

So it's a beautiful Father's Day weekend Saturday here in NH. I'm not going to waist it.

To all of you other fathers... Happy Fathers Day.  I hope you have as much fun with yours as I plan to have with mine!

Until next time,
Have a great weekend!
Jeff