Cyber Defense eMagazine September Edition for 2021

Given Cyber Defense Magazine's awarding of unicorns ("a private company with a valuation of over $1
billion") and that Olympic sailing occurred during Black Hat, I created a conceptual framework—The Optis
Series—to highlight innovative and socially conscious companies at Black Hat USA 2021 (UserGuiding).
The Optis Series contains three articles: bronze, silver, and gold. You can learn about the judging criteria
I used for the Optis Series here or scroll to the end of this article.
Coalfire
Mark Carney, COO of Coalfire
Coalfire is known for its abilities in security compliance, but that is not all it offers. Over the past two years,
Coalfire’s front-end security and pen-testing teams grew significantly and continue to grow in funding,
hiring, and expertise. At present, Coalfire is an organically grown company employing approximately one
thousand security professionals globally and plans to hire around three hundred people by the end of
2021.
Coalfire specializes in cloud infrastructure services, working with almost every international enterprise
cloud infrastructure company. As a result, its products and services—pen-testing, architecture, design,
management, compliance, and multi-cloud support—are influenced by how enterprises use the cloud.
Furthermore, Coalfire continues to develop these areas; its teams in attack strategy, privacy and risk
compliance, and cloud-focused services (i.e., pen-testing, engineering, and management) are
expanding.
Used with permission from Coalfire.
Coalfire recently acquired two companies: Neuralys and Denim Group. Neuralys created pen-testing
management platforms into an attack service management framework by utilizing active and passive
scanning, which helped clients identify new and existing vulnerabilities on their networks in an outgoing
manner. In other words, Neuralys invented a way to continuously pentest networks. Furthermore, Coalfire
acquired Denim Group, a consulting firm specializing in pen-testing and application security; their
platform, ThreadFix, applies application-specific vulnerability aggregation from over fifty databases and
tools. ThreadFix consolidates test results and prioritizes vulnerable clients, reducing the remediation time
up to forty percent.
Learn more: By reading Coalfire’s 3 Annual Penetration Risk Report and by exploring its Reddit page.
College students and faculty may be particularly interested in Coalfire because of its Richard E. Dakin
Fund. The fund was created in honor of the late co-founder of Coalfire, Richard E. Dakin. It supports
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