Tag Archive for: Funding

Hillicon Valley: Russian hacking group believed to be behind Kaseya attack goes offline | DHS funding package pours millions into migrant surveillance

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a screen shot of a computer: Hillicon Valley: Russian hacking group believed to be behind Kaseya attack goes offline | DHS funding package pours millions into migrant surveillance | Jen Easterly sworn in as director of DHS cyber agency

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Hillicon Valley: Russian hacking group believed to be behind Kaseya attack goes offline | DHS funding package pours millions into migrant surveillance | Jen Easterly sworn in as director of DHS cyber agency

Welcome and Happy Tuesday! Follow our cyber reporter, Maggie Miller (@magmill95), and tech team, Chris Mills Rodrigo (@millsrodrigo) and Rebecca Klar (@rebeccaklar_), for more coverage.

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Websites used by the cyber criminal group known as REvil went dark Tuesday, just over a week after the group was linked by cybersecurity experts to the ransomware attack on software company Kaseya. While it is unknown why the websites went dark, President Biden last week urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to take further steps against hackers based in his country, and hinted to reporters that the U.S. had the option of disrupting the hackers’ servers.

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, the House Appropriations Committee marked up the annual Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, approving a proposal that included millions to pay for technologies that surveil immigrants.

SUSPICIOUS TIMING FOR A HOLIDAY: Websites on the dark web used by a criminal hacking group believed to be behind the recent massive ransomware attack on software company Kaseya went offline Tuesday.

The hacking group, REvil, is believed to be based in Russia, and has been linked by the FBI to the ransomware attack in May on JBS USA, the nation’s largest beef producer. The more recent attack on Kaseya impacted up to 1,500 companies, many of them small businesses.

According to The New York Times, the websites on the dark web used by REvil to negotiate payment with victims and lists of companies it had targeted went dark early on Tuesday morning.

John Hultquist, the vice president of Analysis at cybersecurity group FireEye’s Mandiant Threat Intelligence, confirmed the takedown, saying in a statement provided to The Hill Tuesday that “at the time of analysis…

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Keyless Rides New Partnerships to Another $3 Million in Seed Funding

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The biometric authentication startup Keyless has brought in another $3 million in seed funding. The latest round was led by the Italian venture capital firm P101 SGR, with additional support from Primomiglio SGR, Inventures, and Gumi Crypto Capital. 

Keyless Rides New Partnerships to Another $3 Million in Seed Funding

The latest influx of cash brings Keyless’ total amount of seed funding to $9.2 million. According to Keyless, the new funds were secured based on the strength of a trio of new partnerships with Microsoft Azure AD B2C, OneLogin, and Auth0, all three of which are major identity and access management providers.

The $3 million reflects investor confidence in those new partnerships. Keyless noted that while companies like OneLogin and Auth0 provide other organizations with solutions that make it easier to manage employee and customer identities, they do not always develop their own biometric authentication software, and need to form alliances with companies that do. Keyless happens to be one such provider, which is why the company believes that the new partnerships will help Keyless make connections with a larger number of end users.

“Traditional multi-factor authentication can be cumbersome, expensive, and susceptible to new attack avenues,” said Keyless CEO Andrea Carmignani. “By partnering with IAM providers, we can serve the market’s need with innovative authentication solutions that are not only intuitive for users, but offer stronger protection against emerging mobile security and privacy threats.”

“Keyless offers a sophisticated solution that helps authentication and identity management providers put the user and their privacy first,” added P1010 SGR Partner Giuseppe Donvito. “Embracing biometric technology that utilises a distributed cloud network not only helps eliminate fraud, phishing and account takeover threats, it also ensures that sensitive biometric information is never at risk of being lost, stolen or mishandled.”

Keyless previously brought in $2.2 million in seed funding in a round that closed in 2019. The company is hoping to capture a portion of a biometric systems market that is expected to be worth $68.6 billion by 2025.

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April 16, 2021 – by Eric Weiss

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Hub, a productivity platform for technical sales professionals, launches with $1M in funding – TechCrunch

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Hub, a productivity platform for technical pre-sales, has formally launched with $1 million in seed funding.

CEO Freddy Mangum and CTO Karl Gainey founded Hub in 2020. The pair both had experience in technical sales and recognized the challenges of using spreadsheets to manage their business.

They researched and surveyed sales engineers at big and small companies alike, discovering that many of these professionals were spending a lot of time doing things like “wrangling data to report to management, forcing individual contributors to enter data into a CRM (customer relationship management) system.”

“Performing these kinds of mundane tasks was taking time away from them actually selling,” said Mangum. “We also came to the conclusion that technical sales professionals have been the unsung heroes of sales, behind the scenes driving enterprise.”

So they set about creating a better way for presales, solution architects and sales engineers to manage their day-to-day technical sales activities.

Then COVID hit, and obviously, as Mangum puts it, digital selling became much more real.

“That really accentuated the need for specific commercial tooling,” he said.

San Francisco-based Hub was born. The company describes its offering as a SaaS application that “securely interconnects and complements popular CRM systems and productivity applications.”

As a personalized productivity platform, Hub is designed to help individual contributors manage the sales process. By gaining greater visibility into every step, the goal is to better analyze and do more accurate forecasting so an organization can better “identify investment areas while taking corrective actions in real time,” Mangum said.

“Our tool can help them automate the mundane tasks and put the focus on high-value tasks to actually win more business,” he added.

Image Credits: Courtesy of Hub

Targeting technical sales professionals is an underserved market, according to Mangum, which presents tremendous opportunity.

Investors in the company include Tom Noonan, general partner of Atlanta-based TechOperators (and former chairman and CEO of Internet Security Systems, which was acquired in 2007 by IBM for $1.3…

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Veterans charity CEO calls for reset on approach to funding

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Veterans charity CEO calls for reset on approach to funding

Sir Keir later made the point that money was “being sprayed at companies that don’t deliver” | Credit: PA Images

‘Make online contributions to charities that are struggling’ was the Prime Minister’s plea to MPs in a recent exchange about Government support for veterans organisations. As the Government pledges another £254m to tackle rough sleeping, now more than ever, it is important to target spending wisely.

In a recent Armistice Day exchange about government spending, Labour leader Keir Starmer invited the Prime Minister and fellow MPs to praise the ‘remarkable work’ of veterans’ charities – singling out two of the nation’s largest and most well-known for mention.

Sir Keir pointed out that they had seen a significant drop in funding since the start of the pandemic – to the point where they were having to make ‘difficult decisions’ about redundancies and keeping facilities open.

Of course this is also true of the wider charity sector, to which my points are equally relevant.

The exchange provoked a rightfully enthusiastic and positive response, but it was a general one; predicated, I suspect, on an assumption that veterans’ charities were homogenous and equally engaged in providing practical and immediate support for struggling veterans.

This clearly isn’t the case and I want to push for greater thought about this area prior to any allocation of new funding. 

Government support for charities in the present climate must be needs driven. This is a time of crisis, in which financing of non-essential services seems very  inappropriate.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation predicts that 2.5m households are worried about paying rent over winter, with 700,000 already in arrears and 350,000 at risk of eviction. This will only be compounded by a rise in unemployment, predicted to be the sharpest for half a century. Naturally, some of those affected will be ex-servicemen and women.

Let’s get much smarter about how Government money is used to address social exclusion. 

To date Veterans Aid has provided 275 days of uninterrupted service…

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