Keeper Security locks your secrets in a (digital) vault
By Byron Acohido, ThirdCertaintyLAS VEGAS—There are 8 million tales at Black Hat Vegas 2015, which opens here Wednesday at the sun-scorched Mandalay Bay Hotel convention center.
This annual event, in its 18th year, continues to attract record numbers of vendors and corporate buyers (10,000-plus) for a couple of days and nights of speeches, exhibiting and networking—in a glitzy setting befitting a high-profile, steadily growing global industry.
The business of supplying information security software, hardware and services should top $70 billion this year. That figure comes from tech industry consultancy Gartner. And Gartner estimates that the global cybersecurity commerce will continue growing at a 9 percent a year clip for the foreseeable future.
So at mega cybersecurity conventions like Black Hat and RSA, held in the spring in San Francisco, there are security horror stories aplenty, as well as actionable information about best security practices and, of course, product pitches galore.
One compelling tale comes from Darren Guccione and Craig Lurey, CEO and CTO, respectively, of Keeper Security, whom I just sat down with.
The saga of Keeper Security began on a dreary, 20-hour plane ride to China in 2008. Guccione and Lurey were on a business trip together. They started to noodle an idea. At the time, the iPhone was a breakthrough device. The Apple Store was just about to open.
“We could see the smartphone was going to be the device of the future,” recalls Guccione, a CPA by training.
Buckled into their jetliner seats, Guccione and Lurey, the techie, recognized a budding problem, around which they thought they could build a business: the Apple Store was bereft of apps to lock down passwords, photos or any sensitive file that smartphone users likely someday soon would begin to routinely store on their mobile devices.
A business is born
So the partners devoted the next two years to developing a service called Keeper, rolling out the initial working version in 2009. Keeper is a password management and file storage service organized around putting all of your logons, for all of your web accounts—as well as logons to access sensitive files—in one central location.
An individual annual subscription costs $30. And companies can buy an enterprise version, starting at $750 a year for five employees.
Sitting at a Starbucks at Mandalay Bay, Guccione and Lurey showed me enough in a quick demo for me to be impressed. Keeper appears to deliver a stunningly simple form of individual empowerment that restores control of personal privacy to the individual. I’m looking forward to trying it.
Good memory not necessary
In a nutshell, you put all your logons for all of your online accounts into a digital vault. Into this digital vault you also can upload photo images of all your credit cards, images of your tax returns, and/or any other sensitive digital files that should be for your eyes only.
Something of a sea change in user behavior is required. But that could be a good thing.
Instead of trying to remember weak passwords for all of your Web accounts, you rely on Keeper to execute all of your logons within your digital vault.
Keeper securely handles each logon, generating a unique high-strength password for each Web account and each file you choose to store in your digital vault.
This all happens quickly and intuitively, at least from what I could tell from Guccione’s quick demo.
Access denied
The power of this is that no bad guy—or good guy, for that matter—can access the account logons and sensitive files sitting inside your Keeper digital vault. That includes hackers, phishers and identity thieves. It also may restrict, somewhat, the ability for Google, Facebook, the Chinese and even the NSA from tracking what you do on the Internet. I’ll have to look in the latter, a bit more.
With 60 employees, Keeper Security currently has 8 million users of the Keeper password management service. Guccione and Lurey arrived at Black Hat with high hopes of scaling up their business to several times that magnitude.
Security and privacy concerns arising from the Internet of Things plays right into that.
Guccione observes: “With the proliferation of the Internet of Things, the number of hacks and network infiltrations is going to skyrocket. We’re expecting somewhere between 40 to 50 billion devices to come into circulation in the next five years.
Think about all those additional nodes. All of those devices are potential entry points for a hacker to breach a home or office network.
“A password manager allows you to set a separate, high-strength password for each account credential you have, and it avoids using the same weak password on every Web account you have.”
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