Posts tagged:

security

Gemalto Acquires Valimo Wireless For Undisclosed Sum

by Ville Vesterinen, February 3, 2010 — Leave a Comment

Gemalto, provider of end-to-end security solutions, has acquired a Finnish startup Valimo Wireless. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Some of Valimo’s investors included Altine Group, Risto Siilasmaa and SpringBank TechVentures.

Valimo has developed a two-channel, two-factor authentication based on Public Key Infrastructure, combining an over the air platform with a software client in the SIM to generate a legally binding electronic signature. What this jargon from the press release means is that Valimo enables mobile phone users to securely authenticate themselves, digitally sign documents and confirm legally binding transactions simply by entering a self-chosen passphrase or a PIN code. Voilà!

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Mobile Payment Solutions Developer Accumulate Lands VC Funding

by Miikka Kukkosuo, June 23, 2009 — Leave a Comment
Accumulate logoAccumulate, a Swedish mobile payment and security solution provider, received an investment from The Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund (The Sixth AP Fund; Sjätte AP-fonden). The Sixth AP fund is the so called Swedish state fund for long-term risk capital, investing in small and medium-sized growth companies. http://www.apfond6.se/en/
The size of the investment has not been disclosed.
Accumulate had an angel round in 2008 in which Carl Palmstierna, a famous Swedish business angel, and Patric Svanberg invested in the company. Carl Palmstierna is currently the chairman of the board.
Accumulate’s CEO and co-founder Stefan Hultberg comments that the cash will be used in expanding the business of Accumulate’s mobile service platform Flexion and its new mobile security solution, which is in an establishment phase.
The mobile service platform Flexion allows for flexible pricing and license control of mobile applications and games, and is managed by Accumulate’s UK subsidiary. The company has business for example with Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung, and despite strong revenue growth needed new cash for working capital due to the notoriously long payment cycles in the mobile business. Accumulate will also strengthen its operations team. Accumulate claims to have served 6 million end users up to date.
Accumulate’s mobile security solution can be utilized for example for securing credit card purchases and person-to-person money transfers, for secure logins and signing, and enabling payments by mobile phone. The first pilot project is starting next month, according to Stefan. Also an OpenID based solution is coming still this summer. Stefan identifies the banking segment as the most interesting target for the solution, though they can be slow in adapting new technology. In addition, Accumulate is also interested in other industries and especially the enterprise security market. In order to reach the enterprise market Accumulate will utilize a channel sales strategy, having just a couple weeks ago hired a channel sales manager for building up the partnerships.
The press release (in Swedish; here is Google translated version).

Accumulate logoAccumulate, a Swedish mobile payment and security solution provider, has received an investment from The Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund (The Sixth AP Fund; Sjätte AP-fonden). The Sixth AP fund is the so called Swedish state fund for longterm risk capital, investing in small and medium-sized growth companies.  The size of the investment has not been disclosed.

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ErAce Security Blocks SMS Vulnerability With New Firewall Product

by Miikka Kukkosuo, June 2, 2009 — Leave a Comment

erAce logoerAce Security Solutions has launched a mobile firewall for preventing SMS attacks on smartphones that could result in an attacker hijacking mobile data connections. The product is called Settings Firewall and it is targeted Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems (more info, PDF).

There has been a lot of discussion on possible SMS vulnerabilities lately. For example, F-Secure has reported the first ever SMS worm, and just end of 2008 there were headlines about the Curse of Silence denial of service attack. It is often deemed as just a matter of time before the first more serious threats appear. 

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Yubico Offers Master Key To Web

by Miikka Kukkosuo, September 4, 2008 — 1 Comment

Yubico is a Swedish American security startup, founded in 2007 and based in Stockholm Sweden and Sunnyvale CA.

Yubico’s mission is to “make Internet identification secure, easy, and affordable for everyone”. The firm offers a physical token called YubiKey, which can be used for secure identification to web services.

The device is a simple one-button USB keyboard designed to generate a unique user identity and a one-time passcode, which will be sent to the PC as keyboard characters, thus saving the user from typing. When submitting the web form with the passcode, the information is verifed against the security provider’s authentication server. YubiKey can also be combined with a PIN or password for two-factor authentication.

YubiKey has quite good differentiating benefits compared to competing solutions. It also doesn’t require any client software or installation, and thus works on any USB-enabled computer. YubiKey can currently be used with any website supporting OpenID. At the moment other possible uses include Windows login, Wordpress, Web single sign on, OpenVPN, Phpbb Forum, and Windows ActiveDirectory. Yubico has a developer community working on gradually spreading the support.

The company states the product suits perfectly any high security web-based application where fast and frequent online authentication is needed, for example government services and financial transactions as well as different purchases. According to their own words they aim to serve everyone from individuals to large corporations and the web community (which sounds ok for a universal security solution provider, though somewhat unfocused for a startup).

Yubico sells the YubiKey hardware online for quite an affordable price of 30 USD and offers the basic SDK under open source, to enable building customized authentication services. They also run their own validation servers and offer the service for subscription.

WOT wants to make browsing safer

by Ville Vesterinen, September 2, 2008 — Leave a Comment

WOT, or Web of Trust, is a so called ’safe surfing’ software that warns the users of  ill websites, namely scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites.

WOT wants to primarily see itself as a community website. The service gets it’s information from other trusted sources that gather related data as well as from its user community. WOT software can be downloaded for Firefox (as I did) and for IE.

The company boast some impressive figures. According to WOT’s CEO, Esa Suurio, it has 20 million rated website and broke 1 million user downloads during August 2008.

When asked about WOT’s business model, Suurio says that they are still working on the best way to monetize the service, but that 20 million rated websites is clearly an asset, which the company is ready to lincense to third parties. Suurio adds that WOT can also act as a marketing platform. For this particular use new concepts that fit WOT’s philophy and its community model are under way.





Before starting WOT Esa Suurio, a Finnish serial software entrepreneur, founded a local Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing house InfoManager and led the company for about ten years before a successful exit in August 2001 -just before the hardest downturn in the dot-com bubble years.