Cybersecurity Firm Said To Have Created Threats, Then Wooed Customers

The founder was a former chiropractor who in 2003 perceived the need for a product that could address a pervasive species of cybercrime that uses the so-called “dark web.” It was pioneering work, and the enterprise was courted or honored by top U.S. security agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, and corporate clients came to include American Express and Goldman Sachs. But what later followed, says this New Yorker article, placed its founder and principal “at the center of one of the strangest stories in the brief history of cybersecurity; he would be mired in lawsuits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits, which would gather into a vortex of litigation so ominous that one friend compared it to the Bermuda Triangle.” His alleged misbehavior (he has never been convicted of a crime, investigations appear to have petered out, and he’s said to be working on a memoir) involved exploitation of what some in the industry call FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt. All cyber companies exploit FUD to some extent, but his company is alleged to have taken it to another level, where instead of just playing on the fear of a threat, it amplified or conjured up the evidence for one it said had already penetrated the client’s systems.