WhiteHat Security Services Find Web Site Flaws

Company:

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: WhiteHat Sentinel

Year Founded: 2001

Number of Channel Partners: 10

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: WhiteHat taps the increasingly popular Software-as-a-Service paradigm to address the exponential increase of sophisticated and financially motivated Web application threats.

The Lowdown: WhiteHat Security prides itself on offering customers a way to know what the hackers know, and even a few things they don't, with a continuous look at the security holes in their Web environments.

Founded in 2001 by a former Yahoo information security officer, WhiteHat aims to help

customers understand and protect Web infrastructure by conducting comprehensive Web application security assessments and offering remediation services for end users that require continuous monitoring and protection.

"A lot of people traditionally do this through consulting companies, but we do it on an ongoing basis," said Bill Pennington, senior vice president of services at WhiteHat.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company aims to address the rising tidal wave of financially motivated Web-based attacks at the application level, preventing hackers from infiltrating and planting malicious code on users' Web sites. "Most companies have shut down the network side of the house," Pennington said. "But attackers have found it's much easier to attack the software companies have built in-house to secure their data."

To help combat growing Web threats, WhiteHat offers WhiteHat Sentinel, a SaaS-platform assessment tool and Web-site-vulnerability manager designed to evaluate and verify all classes of vulnerabilities, as well as protect data, ensure compliance and reduce security risks from Web-related attacks.

For its partners -- a mix of small boutique firms and large enterprise resellers -- WhiteHat provides an opportunity to significantly expand their customer base, while allowing them scalability of servicing large corporate markets that house dozens of Web sites.

Pennington said that WhiteHat's offerings fill a valuable niche in meeting the rising demand for auditing and assessment services as the result of regulatory compliance laws such as Sarbanes Oxley and HIPAA. And customers run a range from big financials and health- care industry organizations to e-commerce and any other organization that complies with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) mandates.

"That's certainly a driver," he said. "Increasingly, we've seen our customers take budget away from areas they have control over, like the network side, and go to Web application security from us."