If you own a business and you have a website, network, product, or application then you should safeguard it from the hackers and accidental data breaches. When small businesses hear about network security it’s easy to think that “they’re only after big companies, we should be fine”. However, the majority of cyber-attacks are aimed at small and mid-size businesses. For over a decade, cyber criminals have targeted SMBs as a soft, easy target, as compared to the large companies with dedicated network security teams.
Waylon Krush, Founder & CEO of Lunarline, Inc. understood the need to fill this gap in the cyber-security industry and in 2004 founded Lunarline to help businesses fight back against cyber crime
Waylon’s Journey from a Cyber Security Expert to a Successful Cyber Entrepreneur
Waylon grew up in Box Elder, South Dakota, near Ellsworth Air Force Base. From kindergarten on Waylon had access to computers, learning the ins and outs of both software and hardware.
“I was lucky that Box Elder, was well let’s say entertainment challenged,” says Waylon. “This gave me plenty of time to focus on video games.”
Getting access to video games in Box Elder often required a bit of creativity. “We would buy ‘game books’ at rummage sales and the like. These were physical books of video game code that we would then hand type into a computer and try to compile. Of course, they never compiled successfully, and so we’d spend hours debugging the code until we could finally play.”
“This was my first real hands-on with programming and I was sold on what I wanted to do when I grew up.”
By the time Waylon joined the Army he was a skilled programmer. This proved useful during his military signals analysis courses, when his command of scripting languages earned him many free days on various Pensacola Florida beaches, as his instructors didn’t want him in class, sharing answers.
During his military career Waylon refined his programming and networking skills and was an early pioneer in the art of identifying computer weaknesses and shutting down attacks. “After identifying the first ever live information operations attacks against US systems I was given an impact award and sent to Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) which is now 1st Information Operations command. Today we have different names and terms for these type events, but this would have been considered one of the first live identification of a nation state attack and that was back in 1999. Here I was able to focus my skills and career in cyber security which lead to my first real job out of the military at AT&T. Shortly thereafter I started Lunarline.”
Lunarline: Pivoting to Cyber Success
Founded in 2004, Lunarline is a full spectrum cybersecurity company. They started out developing RFID technology for safety and security and, harkening back to Waylon’s Box Elder days, a platform that would use full-packet inspection to recognize when people were cheating on video games.
Grit in difficult times is Waylon’s forte, something he has made a key element of Lunarline’s corporate culture. Lunarline’s initial business plans failed to gain traction in the market., But Waylon successfully pivoted and transferred his company’s secure RFID expertise into a successful services business secure logistics systems in DoD. They also adapted the anti-cheating technologies they had developed for the video game sector and built a suite of cyber and privacy products for Federal and commercial clients. Lunarline now has a platform of solutions that help over 500 clients globally fight back against modern cyber-crime.
Emerging as a Leading Cyber Solutions Provider
Lunarline develops and delivers solutions to modern cyber and IT challenges. With over 500 clients across the intelligence, defense federal civilian and private sectors, their solutions help some of the world’s largest, most complex organizations fight back against cybercrime. But such rapid growth in so many diverse cyber disciplines creates its own challenges, particularly around branding. “I’ll admit, keeping pace with this fast of growth has been an interesting branding challenge. We’ve had a tough time keeping a consistent look and feel across such a broad and innovative portfolio,” says Waylon. “Many of our customers don’t even know that their tools, and training and services and managed services all come from one source. But we just embarked on a complete rebranding of all our capabilities to better tie them back to the Lunarline brand.”
Source :-The 20 Most Admired Tech Leaders in Business 2017
