Risky Business #485 -- Infosec startups overfunded, good exits unlikely

On this week’s show we’re checking in with Kelly Shortridge and the topic is zombies. Not the botnet kind, the heavily-VC-backed kind.

A recent report from the Reuters news agency highlighted the amount of VC pouring into the so-called “cyber” industry vs the amount of money actually coming out of it in the form of profitable exits isn’t matching up. The industry is filling up with so-called zombie companies – they’ll never exit, but they’re not going to completely die, either.

As it turns out, Kelly recently did a presentation on precisely this topic, so in this week’s feature we get her take on why this is happening and what’s likely to change. The tl;dr is something will have to give in the next couple of years, and it’s going to be ugly.

In this week’s sponsor interview we check in with Jordan Wright of Duo Security. Jordan has done some research into phishing kits. While phishing isn’t the sexiest topic, the team at Duo has actually done some pretty comprehensive research here – they looked at thousands of kits and pulled out some interesting stats.

We’ll talk to him about that, and also about the likelihood that U2F hardware will soon be baked into consumer devices. That’s really going to change things in years to come.

Adam Boileau, as always, pops in to discuss the week’s news. We cover the:

• Strava heatmap
• Dutch infiltration of Cozy Bear
• Possible nationalisation of the US 5G network on security grounds
• Microsoft disabling Intel Spectre patches
• Google’s Chronicle announcement
• US$400m Cyptocurrency ownage
• MOAR

The show notes/links are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.