This article is more than 1 year old

Secunia bets on open information for security growth

Opens free PSI 3.0 patch scanner for all

RSA 2012 Danish vulnerability specialist developer Secunia has released the latest beta of its Personal Software Inspector (PSI), and says it is betting on an open approach to security information to grow the company.

Founder Niels Henrik Rasmussen told The Register that his company will continue to work on open information sharing with the security industry, rather than trying to lock down data for its own advantage. The benefits were clear, he said: Secunia has grown 182 per cent in the last three years, at a time when less-open competition was performing less well.

"The security community provides us with a lot of intelligence, which we can assess and then give back, instead of 'if you want my offering you have to pay for it'," he said. "People like the fact that we provide open solutions, the fact that we push solutions to security community."

So far, the strategy is working very well indeed, he said. The company now gets nearly a third of its revenue from US customers, despite only having opened US operations in 2009. If Secunia's high-profile booth at the RSA expo is any indication, business is good – the first time this El Reg hack met Rasmussen, the company had a tiny booth at the back of the hall held together with duct tape.

During the show the company released the beta of PSI 3.0, which scans host computers for unpatched code, back-checks against Secunia's list of released and stable patches, and then automatically updates the system.

The software is installed on over four million endpoints, Rasmussen says, and the final build of the code will be out in June. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like