Altinet founders swim into vendor seas with launch of Boxphish

MSP execs hoping to make splash in cybersecurity training pond with new business

The founders of Leeds-based MSP Altinet are moving into the vendor space with the launch of Boxphish, a cybersecurity awareness training company.

The new company offers training solutions to SMBs to raise awareness among employees of the online threats they may face, and educating them on ways to mitigate such risks.

The company was launched last month and introduced its first product, Boxphish Cyber Awareness, into the market last week.

Boxphish Cyber Awareness is an automated training solution in which informative materials.

These resources include infographics, hints and tips and newsletters, and are formatted to help combat attacks such as ransomware and spear phishing (which is the practice of sending emails from what appears to be a trusted sender to induce specific individuals to reveal confidential information).

Boxphish has been co-founded by Dan Bailey, MD of Altinet, and Henry Doyle, director of managed services at Altinet.

Bailey explained that the company was formed after witnessing the lack of cybersecurity training that organisations were providing their employees.

"We have found that organisations do very little to no training," he told CRN.

"We found that the software that what out there was too complex for what IT managers were looking for, and so we used that feedback for developing our software. The key USP of Boxphish is the way that it is presented to end users and IT teams."

Bailey added that the formation of the new company will not affect Altinet's relationships with its vendor partners, such as Barracuda, CensorNet and Sophos.

"We have been really open with our core partners and we don't believe that we compete with any products from our partners," he stated.

"The way to look at it is if Altinet was going to take on another back-up vendor it would be similar to what we are doing with Boxphish."

The new venture is going up against the likes of Wombat, but Bailey said that Boxphish will be tackling a different market space than its competitors.

"We have found that those kinds of software are aimed more at enterprise level customers and we are focussing on SMB," he stated.

"One thing that customers also commented on was that the content of those types of software were too Americanised, so one of our key capabilities is to have shot and easy to understand content."

The MD said that Boxphish has a dedicated team of three people working on the technical side, marketing and content creation, but that there are plans to grow the team in the near future.

Himself and Doyle have taken director positions of the fledgling company, and Bailey added that Altinet and Boxphish will be kept as separate entities.

Boxphish is currently lining up another product to launch in the next few months, which will include a phishing simulator that will send emails to an organisation's employees imitating a phishing scam in order to test their reactions to such a risk.

"In the first year we want to to have over 100,000 users of the system," said Bailey.

"We will also be focussing on refreshing the quality of content every few months, which I think is really important."