Secure data is essential requirement in todays’s digitalised market and influencing strategies. For any company to bring up its agenda, its requires to hold on to the data itself. Therefore, this startup brings up the key facility to secure data beginning from the city of Indore. The founders, Geet Vaishnav and Prateek Sharma decided to start the initiate from their hometown and hence, the startup took a greater place across the country.
The duo founded Securitybulls is a penetration testing and infrastructure security service provider, in 2016. The platform analyses a company’s digital assets from a hacker’s point of view to supplement a blueprint for remediation to lend a hand to build or improve a protection and safe-keeping strategy. “We decided to start up here because no one in central India is providing this sort of service. We wanted to become the first penetration testing and infrastructure security service provider in central India,” marks Prateek. Geet and Prateek witnessed a lack of understanding when it came to security, and hence they suspected the need for organisations to be more concentrated on it. Geet wanted to become an Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP), during his engineering days in Indore giving him an exposure to work more in related projects during his college days. He chose to do something of his own and make it through to secure data of different organisations. He also decided to drop the college and begin with freelancing on the same. He says that he had functioned on different projects with data companies and financial institutions. He also worked and taught other college students, as an OSCP security freelancer.
“It is also tough to sell such services in a city like Indore as companies here are looking to buy a Benz at the price of a Nano. Also, people are not aware about information security and its importance, so it’s hard for us to sell in Indore. But then, there also are no security startups in central India and Indore is our hometown,” claims Prateek. The team is currently working on building an AI-based web vulnerability scanner, that would be based upon their own research of various vulnerabilities. “It will be helpful to spot out business logic flaws as well. Since Blockchain is an emerging technology, we’re interested to create an AI-based smart contract code review platform,” said Prateek.
Securitybulls began with several packages where its clients include Angel Broking, Arihant Capital and US-based Agfirst Farm Cred, Amar Ujjala in Noida, and Zerodha in Bengaluru. Based on the client demands, the company charges $200 to $1500 per day, per engineer. For now, the team functions with different engineers and hackers on a part-time basis. “We’ve completed two years successfully and our monthly revenue is now around Rs 5 lakh. In 2017, our revenue was Rs 35 lakh,” exclaimed Prateek. The company has also been recognised at the Data Centre Summit in Mumbai in 2017 under the ‘Data Security’ category.
Prateek explained the functioning of the platform, “We perform various attacks on the given set of scope and provide a detailed report containing the PoCs. We use our own scripts to breach the security of our clients and help them mitigate the issues in their infrastructure.” “We run on-going audits of applications and networks for vulnerabilities we derive from a prioritised researched list, we provide network penetration testing to identify and mitigate risks in your network, which cannot be easily detected by vulnerability scanners. This is done for both internal and external networks to ensure that your network is as secure as possible,” notes Prateek.
