Space Rogue from L0pht and Hacker News Network joins Tenable!

I’m very happy to announce that I have recently joined Tenable as a Technical Manager.

I’ve been in the ‘security game’ for quite some time and have seen security companies and products come and go. I even founded a few of them. When you look at all the fly-by-night security products available on the market that appear and disappear after just a few years, you see they typically had little to no lasting impact and little to no value before they either went out of business or got gobbled up by a larger competitor, never to be heard from again (along with your support contract). It is refreshing to find a company and product that has been around, that keeps getting better, and isn’t going to go anywhere for quite some time.

The fact that Tenable has been able to consistently improve Nessus for a decade and a half and has augmented its network scanner with the Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS), SecurityCenter, and over fifty thousand plugins says a lot about the company and its products. Instead of stagnating and becoming irrelevant, Tenable keeps adding new features and functionality. They even added plugins for SCADA checks back in 2006! Tenable has been able to adapt to the industry as it has moved from classic servers and desktops to mobile devices, complex web applications, and cloud computing without missing a beat.

One of the reasons I started the Hacker News Network fifteen years ago and one of the underlying goals of The L0pht was to try to expose the hype, FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), and exaggerated security claims promoted by vendors and media. One aspect that I respect about Tenable is that the founders have enough confidence in their products to avoid such fear tactics.

It is exciting to be a part of this, to walk the halls at Tenable headquarters and feel the enthusiasm just exuding from the walls. For an 11 year old company, which is positively ancient in the security industry, to have this kind of energy and buzz with products that are constantly changing and adapting to current threats is exhilarating. For a company this young, and at the same time an elder in the industry, the future is very bright and I look forward to traveling into it with them.