Fort Myers cybersecurity company Cigent takes off with funding, urgency
An early 2020 hack of the Texas-based information technology company SolarWinds created widespread repercussions, creating an urgent need for solutions that are happening in Fort Myers.
The repercussions included the opportunity for a Fort Myers-based cybersecurity company to increase its reach in preventing the next big cyberattack on governments and private companies.
Cigent, established in 2018 in Fort Myers off Widman Way, just across from the Fort Myers Police Department, received $7.6 million April 27 in funding from technology companies and individual investors.
Those funds will be used to further advance Cigent’s technology in preventing future information hacks.
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The SolarWinds hack went undetected for months, and hackers breached the highest levels of the United States government and private companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Intel, the Wall Street Journal reported, as well as organizations such as the California Department of State Hospitals and Kent State University.
The SolarWinds hack served as a great awakening for the government and companies to further invest in cybersecurity, Cigent’s founders said.
“The problems in cybersecurity over the past 10 years have been exploding in worldwide damage,” Cigent CEO Brad Rowe said. “SolarWinds, it was like D-Day in the cybersecurity industry. It will play out over the next 10 years. Intel, Microsoft, these were companies that have pretty big defenses.
"The only way to really protect entities was to actually provide cybersecurity and intelligence in the data itself. If you have a laptop, we provide cybersecurity down literally in the storage of that laptop. Any time there’s any kind of attack, say ransomware or malware or an unauthorized user – someone like an Edward Snowden – we stop them cold with protections that we have.”
Sitting in a conference room within the Jerome Building in downtown Fort Myers, Rowe and chief technology officer Greg Scasny showed off a hard drive. Scasny preferred it not to be photographed for proprietary reasons. It fit in the palm of his hand. He also showed a smaller version of the drive that could fit between the thumb and index finger. They revealed that about $8 million in research went into those creations.
“One of the questions we get asked a lot is: ‘Why are you in Fort Myers, Florida of all places?’” Rowe said. “There’s a simple answer to that. We’re actually a Silicon Valley-style company that’s located in Fort Myers.”
Rowe and colleague Steve Nicol, who is the senior vice president of sales and marketing, each had California roots working for various technology companies before starting Cigent.
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Cigent does work with the federal government, including the Department of Defense. But it also has built a loyal base of Lee County customers, such as the City of Fort Myers, LaBelle, Waterman Broadcasting and FineMark National Bank & Trust, Nicols said.
Capital funding will expand Cigent's reach
The recent surge in capital funding will help Cigent expand its reach from government to private entities.
“We have a number of customers in Fort Myers,” Nicols said. “It’s been great to not only start the company but to work with the local community to start to build out our customer base. The local community in Lee County has really been receptive to our solutions. We already had the intellectual properties here in Fort Myers. We wanted to make it practical to start the company there.”
News from over the weekend only made Cigent's mission more pertinent, Scasny said. The Colonial Pipeline, which runs petroleum from Houston, Texas, to the U.S. East Coast, shut down over the weekend because it had been hacked.
"If they had been using our product, they wouldn’t be in the news," Scasny said. "They obviously didn’t have adequate protections in place to stop this from happening. We could have at least stopped them from stealing all the data that they did. They stole all the important documents. Payroll data, reports, business plans, all that kind of stuff."
These could be organized criminals, or it could be some yahoo in Russia, sitting in a basement, Scasney said.
"They sell access to malware and ransomware, and they take a percentage of the profits from their dirty deeds," he said. "You'll be hearing about how it was a sophisticated attack, blah blah blah. No one is going to say that I got hacked by a Russian sitting in a basement somewhere. This isn’t the last one. These are going to keep happening. It’s too easy for the bad actors to do this."
Cigent's products make it "virtually impossible" to steal data, because the protections are placed on the data itself and not within the systems, Scasny said.
A quote from boxing legend Muhammad Ali hangs in the Cigent conference room, along with placards of all the service Cigent products provide.
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given, than to explore the power they have to change it,” Ali’s quote begins. “It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Ali’s philosophy has served Cigent well.
'Hackers are going to hack'
Hackers are going to hack, Scasny said. He knows, because as someone who helps build cyber defense systems, he’s a hacker himself.
“I’ve been cyber for most of my life,” Scasny said. “I did penetration testing. I got paid to break into places and show them what their weaknesses were. And then I help them figure out ways to fix those weaknesses.
“We look at ways to protect data. The problem we have with anything we have with cyber, is we’ve been playing for 30 years, and we’ve been playing Whac-A-Mole. The real offenders out there, they break into a bunch of places and steal a bunch of stuff. The defenders, the good guys, we have to play catch up. It’s always been backward looking.”
Cigent’s philosophy is big like Brer Rabbit and the briar patch. It expects the hacker to enter a system, because impossible is nothing. They will get inside, eventually, almost always.
“There’s three real tenets to an adversary,” Scasny said. “If the adversary has the opportunity, the technical acumen and is smart enough, he’s probably going to succeed. But you can’t control how smart he is. What you can control is the opportunity you give him. What we’re about is, we create solutions that are extremely difficult to bypass if not impossible to bypass. We don’t try to play Whac-A-Mole. We’re not about trying to keep them out. It’s when they get in, we’re not going to let them get to anywhere important.”
Scasny made the analogy to household security.
“You may have locks on your doors or protective windows,” Scasny said. “But when they get in, you’ve got all your goodies in the safe. But what we do, is we make the safe is invisible. They won’t know how to find it. We put our protections on that data itself. Even if you are compromised, we’re not worried about the next vulnerability or the next SolarWinds.”
Thomas DiBenedetto, who has been in Fort Myers for 28 years and has been a part-owner of the Boston Red Sox, recently invested in Cigent.
“I have a bit of an intelligence background myself,” DiBenedetto said. “As the company Cigent developed, it was a natural thing for me to be involved. I met Brad and was invited into the company. There’s a crossover of interests between myself and Cigent. I believe in the mission that Cigent has. I think it is so critical, the work that they do. I feel quite privileged to be part of the company. I enjoy being with these people. They’re great people. They’re extremely intelligent.”
Connect with this reporter: David Dorsey (Facebook), @DavidADorsey (Twitter).
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