Crime pays - when you're hired to stop it

William Kilmer. Photo / Supplied

New Zealand-founded computer security company Marshal8e6 says it is growing despite the global recession and may expand its Auckland research and development centre to bolster its efforts to keep on top of internet threats.

The business formerly known as Marshal announced overnight it was changing its name for the second time in less than a year and would now be known as M86 Security.

But despite finally dropping the Marshal name, which dates back to the business's 1997 birth in South Auckland, the now Californian-based M86 insists it will retain, and possibly grow, its New Zealand workforce of about 60.

"It may be a small contingent down in New Zealand but it's a critical element of our organisation," M86's US-based chief marketing officer, William Kilmer, said yesterday.

In April Marshal8e6 acquired US company Avinti, a business specialising in "behaviour-based malware detection," a technology M86 sees as giving it an edge in the competitive corporate IT security market.

The Auckland development staff have spent the past few months integrating Avinti's technology into M86's core MailMarshal product, giving it the capability to protect corporate computer users from so-called "blended threats" or disguised spam emails that prompt recipients to click on a link to a malicious website, which then downloads potentially dangerous code on to their company network.

Kilmer said blended threats were a growing problem for businesses. Until now corporate security software had only been able to block the malicious emails behind them by identifying them as spam when they arrived on the company's servers. But the senders of these types of emails were getter more adept at finding ways to bypass spam filters, which was where Avinti's technology came in.

"The way we've set up the Avinti technology, and integrated it into the MailMarshal product, is such that we can detect those threats, and what is happening on the web, then make a determination as to how we treat it from the email side - so we can block them from coming through."

It was a technology that was attracting strong interest from M86's business customers, Kilmer said.

"In the corporate market - in Asia-Pacific, Europe and the US - we've seen a number of large enterprises show a strong interest in this capability. That's come primarily because there really has been no ability to block these [malicious emails] before people get them in their inbox."

Kilmer said the Auckland research and development staff would continue to play a major role in M86's response to emerging online threats such as blended attacks.

M86 has recorded record revenue in four of the first six months of this year and added almost 1000 customers to the 20,000 it had when it merged with 8e6 Technologies in November last year. Over the same period the company had added 775,000 licensed users of its products, taking its global licence count to 16 million.

While the Marshal name may be going from the corporate logo, M86 will retain the branding of its two main products, MailMarshal and WebMarshal.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

1997 - Marshal Software formed as subsidiary of software developer Designer Technology.

2002 - Marshal bought by US company NetIQ.

2005 - Marshal's management team buy the company.

2008 - Marshal merges with US security firm 8e6 Technologies to form Marshal8e6.

2009 - Marshal8e6 buys specialist threat detection business Avinti and renames itself M86 Security.