IT Channel Rock Star Profile
“How Do We Stop It?” That was the question Danny Jenkins was asked regard- ing the serious cybersecurity problems clients were expe- riencing. Hearing the question repeated is what ultimately led Danny to found ThreatLocker, a global cybersecurity leader providing enterprise-level cybersecurity tools for the MSP industry. Danny’s fascination with computer security began long before it was an issue. In high school, as a “short person,” he used his computer skills as “muscle.” “I’d write mal- ware applications to delete people’s homework,” Danny said. In 1997, at 16 years old, he became an apprentice at what today is known as an MSP. Extremely technical and ambitious, he moved to Ireland and went to work at Kingspan, a multinational, $4-billion company, where he rose quickly to become the head of IT infrastructure by the time he was 21. Kingspan was acquiring companies nearly every month. With malware coming into play as all the new companies joined together, Kingspan needed stan- dards and secured infrastructure. “It became my responsi- bility to set and implement the standards,” Danny said. “I implemented the anti-spam, email filters, and corporate firewalls. I got a lot of exposure to security as I traveled around the world, implementing global networks.” At 24, he founded his first company, MXSweep, which provided cloud email security and was eventually acquired by FuseMail, a worldwide provider of outsourced email. In 2009, he started another email security company, which he slowly built up and sold. After selling his second company, he began consulting, which led him to two clients (one was the private school his kids attended) who needed help to stop cyber-attacks. Sami Jenkins, COO and co-founder of ThreatLocker, manages Lake Forrester Prep’s IT department,” Danny said. “She was looking after the school’s IT, and they were constantly getting malware. The school was sending out emails with pornography, and the teachers were clicking on everything. It was a big problem.” An MSP in Australia also called for help with a ransom- ware case. “A small insurance company had been encrypt- ed with ransomware — every file, every claims database, every email, everything ,” Danny said. “They told me, ‘We paid the ransom, and we haven’t gotten the data back. The key doesn’t work. If we don’t get the data back, this company is going out of business.’” Danny worked on the problem for weeks. In the end, the CEO wanted to know how to stop it. “I told them the only way to stop it was to deny by default,” Danny said. “While there were products out there that did this, they were all focused on the Department of Defense and big enterprises like Bank of America, not small businesses.” Believing there must be a better way to stop the attacks on these smaller organizations, Danny looked everywhere for a solution, but it didn’t exist. So, he decided to build it himself. “We deployed it in the school in this pre-concept
How ThreatLocker Is Making Cybersecurity Easier For MSPs And Harder For Criminals
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