Writing History
It's still early days for the cybersecurity industry
Journalists are credited with writing the first draft of history. They record events as they happen, often interviewing the primary sources. Future historians are going to have a wealth of information available to them—assuming there is no cataclysmic event that wipes out all the digital archives.
Writing the history of a relatively young industry like cybersecurity has one overwhelming advantage. Most of the pioneers are still with us!
Every year I am able to include more stories of the founders of our industry. Because my own experience in cybersecurity began in 1995, working with the founders of Check Point Software and ISS, I wanted Security Yearbook 2020 to include the story of Check Point’s founders. Gil Shwed, still CEO, was kind enough to provide his story for the first edition. The other pioneers who provided their stories are:
Chris Blask, Co-inventor of Borderware Firewall and NAT (network address translation)
Ron Moritz, Executive at Finjan, Symantec, CA, Microsoft, Our Crowd
Barry Schrager Progenitor of RACF and creator of ACF2
David Cowan, Partner at Bessemer and founder of Verisign
Sandra Toms, Leader of RSA Conference for 20 years
Debbie Taylor Moore, Microsoft, NetSec, and IBM
Renaud Deraison, Creator of Nessus, CO-founder Tenable
Amit Yoran, Founder of Riptech, CEO Tenable
Security Yearbook 2023, the fourth edition of the only history of the cybersecurity industry, is in production now and will be shipped in June, 2023.
There are four new contributors in the latest edition.
Eva Chen, CEO and founder of Trend Micro, relates how she was pulled away from an interest in liberal arts to join her brother-in-law and her sister (Steve and Jenny Chang) in founding Trend Micro. Trend recently celebrated its 35th anniversary. It has experienced steady growth over the decades and outlasted its US competitors, Symantec, and McAfee. Eva followed a different path. Trend never grew by acquisition like the others. Under Eva’s leadership Trend stayed focused. Today there are over 7,000 “Trenders” around the globe.
Kailash Katkar, CEO and founder, Quick Heal. I only recently came to know Kailash and Sanjay Katkar, the founders of the only public cybersecurity company in India. Sanjay reached out during Covid to ask me to join their board. In the early ‘90s Kailash had a thriving business in Pune repairing electronic devices. When computers where introduced he evolved to repair those too. Of course that led to fighting viruses that were spread by floppy disks in the ‘90s. Sanjay created tools to combat and recover from viruses. Kailash build a channel out of the computer repair shops in one city at a time.
Martin Roesch, Founder of Sourcefire, and CEO, Netography. Marty tells his story of creating one of the first open source solutions for monitoring network traffic (IDS) still widely used today. He commercialized Snort with Sourcefire which he ran out of his home in the beginning. He took it public and grew Sourcefire to $250 million in revenue when Cisco acquired it for $2.7 billion in 2013.
Venkat Raghavan, Founder, Stack Identity, and partner, Benhamou Global Ventures. Venkat helped assemble IBM’s portfolio of security businesses through multiple acquisitions. While maintaining a role as a venture capitalist he is primarily a builder and demonstrating that with Stack Identity.
I am always looking for suggestions of pioneers whose stories should be recorded in upcoming editions of Security Yearbook. Who would you like to see in Security Yearbook 2024?
All pre-orders of Security Yearbook 2023 are signed the day after they are printed and bound. Unless you see me at a conference somewhere in the world this is the only way to get a signed copy!