Meet the cybersecurity start-up that wants to protect machines from identity theft

CEO Jeff Hudson says lack of protection is giving 'bad guys' an easy target to attack

Machine identities are just as vulnerable as their human counterparts are, and could leave enterprises wide open to cyberattacks, according to the CEO of tech start-up Venafi.

Jeff Hudson (pictured), CEO of the US-based security firm, told CRN that there is a general lack of awareness around the importance of protecting machine identities on a network.

"People identify themselves onto the network using passwords and logins. However, machines need to identify themselves to one another to be able to transfer information and use machine identity to do so, rather than passwords," he said.

"Around $8bn (£6.3bn) a year is spent on protecting human IDs, but we are only getting started on protecting machine IDs - which the bad guys use as targets for their attacks.

"Fifteen years ago people didn't see the need to protect passwords, but now they do, and the same thing is happening with machine identity."

Venafi, which counts DXC Technology among its partners, recently raised $100m in a funding round, which Hudson said will be used to grow its customer base and headcount.

It is setting aside $12.5m of the investment for its new Machine Identity Protection Development Fund, which was created to expand the integration of machine identity intelligence into a broad range of machines in the enterprise.

"The fund is aimed at a bunch of consultants, developers and systems integrators who want to connect their machine into the Venafi platform," said Hudson.

"We are going to fund people to build these interfaces because it helps our customers. The more machines that are protected on our platform, the safer they are."

Fund recipients will build integrations that deliver greater visibility, intelligence and automation for Venafi customers across any technology that creates or consumes machine identities, added Hudson.

The rest of the $100m investment will be used to grow its customer and partner bases.

Since its founding in 2004, the company has raised $167.2m in funding. Its EMEA headquarters are based in Bracknell.

"We have a healthy ecosystem of partners in the UK and throughout Europe," the CEO said.

"But we are very conscious of the need to be careful with whom we partner.

"The most important thing for this company is that our customers are successful, so we have high standards around the kinds of organisations we work with - they need to feel the same way as we do.

"We also want to make sure we don't have so many partners that they don't make money - we are careful in adding partners as the business grows. We want both partners and customers to be successful."