Now all of a sudden it seems there’s a new IPO filing every week or so. Does this indicate a stronger economy and/or pressure from shareholders to allow their investments to become more liquid, or are people smelling a downturn around the corner and hoping to cash out before valuations drop?
Carbon Black has nowhere to go but up, they're destroying the AV industry and every security consultant I know is pushing this style of endpoint protection over traditional AV. And they're in the enterprise market, so they can charge big bucks.
Spotify on the other hand is one player in a crowded and competitive market with some huge players who could destroy them in a heartbeat. And even with their exclusives and much bigger subscriber count, they're still struggling to beat much smaller competitors in actual engagement [1] (or at the very least struggling to properly count their streams which seems like a basic requirement). It makes little sense for them to go public when they could just as easily be out of business this time next year.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/17192342/apple-music-the-w...
Why hasn't traditional AV created a similar product then?
> In 2016, TPG, Dragoneer and Goldman Sachs lent Spotify $1 billion via convertible debt financing, which was supposed to give the lenders the ability to eventually turn their loans into equity.
> The deal let Spotify bide its time before an IPO, but not too much time: The longer Spotify took to go public, the better the terms would get for the lenders. News emerged Wednesday that the company had confidentially filed IPO documents in late December.
- Dropbox demonstrated a reasonably strong market for IPOs, so it's definitely safer for other companies to get in before the first flop.
- There's probably a lot of pressure to go public, seeing as how many of these companies have private for more than a decade [1]
- There's also reason to believe we may see pressure in the equity markets in the near future, especially as the Fed adjusts interest rates.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bit9/funding_rounds/... Series A was in 2005
EDIT: Agree that if you must go public, go before the music stops. I'm wrong here.
I deployed Bit9/Carbon Black a few years ago.
Trusted apps are cyber fingerprinted using 6 hashes - in order to use a Shattered like attack all 6, including file length would need to be simultaneously crashed.
No rules are required, no scanning is needed, instant protection on installation and can be managed/administered by non-technical staff. Can use an out of the box trust list with over 1000 apps already fingerprinted or build own trust list.
Can be deployed using standard tools and is scalable to global enterprise.
People who think the top level poster’s approach to security is sufficient are gravely mistaken.
For example - what turned out to be a zero day exploit was blocked from executing as it was an unknown app. It was an uninstall script that tried to run ever hour and appeared to be part of an AV solution.
9 months later, it was identified as a zero day exploit by 'traditional' AV companies.
Similarly it has blocked SHA1 attacks where for example a previously trusted app has been compromised but even if the SHA1 matches, the other 5 hashes don't and therefore it is not allowed to execute. If any one hash doesn't match - it is blocked.
Well, they could at least identify when I used ncdu on / and thought it was a crypto-locker, which is nice.
* There wasn't really any "error", per se. It was really just a trial in deciding how much the CIO/CISO was willing to deal with knowing about, versus remaining ignorant by choice since that was far less work. Given where they ended up, I'm not sure whether the millions spent on the software was a smart business decision. <banghead>
