A data breach can happen nearly anywhere.
From banks to supermarkets to universities, the era of the cyberattack and personal information falling into the wrong hands is alive and growing—so much so that cybercrime now costs the global economy $450 billion annually.
However, Don McGuire, CEO of Lock Data Inc., says his product could have prevented recent breaches at Target, K-Mart, Home Depot, and other high-profile companies.
An estimated 56 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen from Home Depot in a massive data breach just two years ago; the retail store Target was hacked, exposing 40 million customers’ credit card data, during the holiday season of 2013.
“Any of the breaches you can think of, we could have prevented had our products been in place,” McGuire, a 20-year Greenwich resident, said. “When any of those events took place, our product would have prevented the leakage or exiting of data.”
Lock Data’s product, called ‘Counter X,’ is unique, McGuire says, in that it completely disallows the exfiltration of data from the data storage area.
The technology company, located in New York City with its lab in Knoxville, Tenn., says its product tackles the two critical points of a cyberattack.
“Our product prevents both the external hacking and exfiltration of the data as well as the bad employee who is not authorized to access the data,” McGuire said. “This is a unique product and something that corporate America and other countries haven’t seen yet.”
Counter-X focuses on ensuring that if a system attacked, the intruder is unable to extract any amount of data.
The counter-exfiltration tool was created at a hub of the U.S. intelligence community—Oak Ridge, Tenn.—after obtaining exclusive licensing rights to technology from the highly respected Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
“Our product comes from the U.S. intelligence community and was created at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, also the home of the Manhattan Project from the 1940’s,” said McGuire.
Funding for the project came from Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which also funded a project called FUSEnet, which took on the task of finding out how to protect data in case of an attack on ORNL.
This led to the creation of the technology used in Lock Data’s Counter X product.
Until recently, it was being used at the highest levels of government and intelligence; it will soon be on the commercial market.
“For me personally, it’s very gratifying, because I like to think that I can bring a solution to a lot of places in the United States and other parts of the world where it is needed to protect the data of individuals, corporations, and governments like they have never been protected before,” McGuire said. “These attacks happen every day.”
The threat to personal information and data comes daily, says McGuire, and is only getting stronger with time.
“Every day, there are other countries and nation states trying to hack into the United States government’s various confidential data sources,” McGuire said. “Every day there are hacker groups or individuals out there in the world, trying to infiltrate our country and our companies. I’m confident that our product can provide a solution. We’re already working on building the next generation of our product so that we can make it even more effective.”
“It’s fun being the CEO of a company that is on the cutting edge of something like cybersecurity,” McGuire added. “It’s fun and exciting. You’re working on something that is to be in the paper every day. At least we know what we’re doing is highly relevant.”
