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Ex-GCHQ chief now heads up infosec firm's advisory board

Walled gardens are 'scintillating proposition' for ex-spy

Sir Iain Lobban, the former chief of GCHQ, has joined a British company's advisory council and has said he finds the prospect of a hands-on role "a scintillating propostion".

Glasswall Solutions formally launched on Friday. The company claims that its tech will thwart all potential phishing attacks by deconstructing and reconstructing email attachments, which are the vector of "94 per cent of all successful attacks."

Glasswall breaks down every file to byte level, searching only for 'known good' and matching the files against manufacturers' standards. A fully-compliant, completely clean file is regenerated in real-time, giving businesses total confidence in security.

That patching Adobe applications has become a regular feature in to-do lists will be a detail brushed under the carpets of history, according to Stan Black, who told The Register that the company's tech meant unstructured data zero-days "didn't exist anymore".

The advisory council is headed by Sir Iain, and has the former Microsoft senior director Ken Urquhart on board as scientific advisor, along with Citrix CSO Stan Black as technology advisor. The big names in the council are expected to help the privately funded company achieve a $20m round of fundraising while dodging any VC investment.

In a canned quote, CEO Greg Sim said he is "honoured that Sir Iain will lend his expertise to Glasswall, as one of a group of extraordinarily talented and authoritative names in the industry that make up our very active board and advisory council."

"Working with Glasswall is a scintillating proposition – a pioneering UK company showing the world how to incorporate security into best business practice," said Sir Iain.

Glasswall claims its solution "is wholly effective in any organisation receiving files, typically via email, over which the vast majority of documents bearing malevolent macros are delivered. In Glasswall’s world, viruses and malware do not exist." Time, as always, will tell. ®

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