A teen-aged Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie in the 1995 cult film, Hackers, took down an evil corporation by hacking on roller skates at video arcades.
The view of hackers has changed over the years and yet the term hackers takes on both a positive and negative connotation. Whether you are being hacked or hackers exposed something for the greater good, or the hacking created made things better or worse, the term knows no boundaries.
According to John Harmander, CMO of Casumo, a mobile gaming company, hacking is an experiment and experiments are needed to see what doesn’t work.
“We have been taught not to hack, because hacking is challenging institutions and the ‘ways things are done’,” said Harmander. ”But, what hacking show us is how things could work and this is what we need in our times.”
Hong, 36 years old, believes a good hacker is required to draw a high and accurate morality boundary.
“Good hackers and crackers cross the borderline between good and evil. So, they always have to keep their strong moral conviction,” says Hong.
SEWorks was born out of the hacking ability of Hong, a Korean entrepreneur with a successful exit under his belt, selling his company Shiftworks in 2010. Shiftworks also specialized in security technology. He also started WOWHACKER, a non-profit research institution of hackers.
Min Pyo Hong, CEO and Founder, SEWorks
The company is comprised of nine hackers each with a high level of proficiency in the security field. In fact, for the last four years the team at SEWorks has advanced the finals of DEF CON, which is known as the hackers’ World Cup. SEWorks and its hackers hack to create mobile security advancements – creatively hacking for good, so to speak and focusing on detection and solutions before the hacking starts.
They might be onto something. not only do they have a two million dollar seed investment from Qualcomm Ventures and Softbank Ventures, Korea, but they already have three products in the web and mobile security market with customers from around the world and they just started the company in 2013.
They are not alone. Big companies like Intel INTC +1.56% and General Motors GM +0.92% have turned to hackers to help innovate. General Motors recently started a hacker program to encourage the creation of new apps for their connected cars. Two 15 year olds from New York City, who can’t even drive a car yet, created a driver’s education app that allows their parents to track their driving proficiency and hours from the connected car they are practicing in.
Intel’s App Pavilion at Mobile World Congress earlier this year in Barcelona, had a dozen or so young companies working on anything from the Internet of Things tech to image recognition and augmented reality for business applications.
Bigger companies with a strategy to innovate today ask two questions: How do we encourage more experiments, and how can we be better hackers? - John Harmander, CMO, Camuso
“Big companies have a lot of users and business, when they are hacked their service or applications, the company loses confidence from the customers,” said Hong, CEO and Founder, SEWorks. “In fact, reliability is what people are concerned about most and what all companies need to focus on because credibility means survivability in the market. Therefore, they want to hire the security experts or the hackers to protect their product and their reputation.”
So, SEWorks created three products to address this need: Medusah, a web-based app protection service that make apps safe from crackers or unusual hacking, using obfuscation technology; AppZerver, an app forgery prevention service; and S-Guard which protects your mobile device from smishing threats.
Obfuscation technology (machine code that’s hard for humans to understand). Smishing (fraudulent messages sent over SMS versus email). Hacking threats. Sounds scary and also strange. It isn’t.
A malware study in recently reported that malware attacks on mobile devices doubled in 2011. Ninety-two percent of the top 100 paid apps on iOS have been hacked and 100% of the same top paid apps on Android. Want more? Forty percent of U.S. mobile users click on unsafe links annually. And, according to Mashable, the biggest trend in mobile vulnerability is related to apps.
SEWorks’ team of hackers in Palo Alto, CA
It makes sense that Qualcomm Ventures would turn its investment arm to this area and fund SEWorks.
“Qualcomm ventures invested in SEWORKS because we have superior technology in mobile application obfuscation/decompiler sector,” says Hong. “Our competitors just provide a source code level obfuscation technology, but our our service, Medusah, performs a deeper level in security technology as using binary level obfuscation technology which makes the app more secure and we believe that we introduced the world’s first binary level all- in- one app obfuscation system and a decompiler solution.”
In the frenetic world of start up funding in Silicon Valley, Hong believes that Qualcomm is truly convinced of the viability of the app security market.
“More than 20% of financial applications in iTunes App Store are hacked. This vulnerability will have a huge financial impact on $83B global application economy, which is still growing fast,” said Hong. “To protect the app itself from hackers absolutely will become very important in the mobile app market moreover the mobile application economy.”
Take a look at their flagship product, Medusah which is all-in-one service for mobile application security. SEWorks’ obfuscating technology makes the source code un-readable, protects application from the hackers and cracking tools.
When you upload your application to SEWorks’ cloud server before releasing it to the application market, their core engine obfuscates the source code of the APK files directly (like Medussa, turns it to stone). Once your application is obfuscated, it’s impossible to reverse engineer your source code with existing cracking tools. The customers, the application developers and the company, can then download a safe application through their product.
The business of hacking, hacking to protect from hackers, is now a business model.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2014/05/25/seworks-hackers-in-the-house/?utm_campaign=techtwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
