[…] Led by National Security Agency (NSA) alumni, ReFirm Labs aims to close the firmware security gap exploited by hackers to gain control of or disable IoT devices such as digital cameras, home appliances, routers, servers, printers and other connected machines. These common devices can be remotely taken over, destroyed or hijacked for Botnet attacks that effectively shut down or slow major web services such as Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, and PayPal. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks use infected devices to bombard websites and have cost some organizations as much as $22,000 a minute in lost business and remediation costs. “Manufacturers often have little visibility or control over the firmware of third-party components that are integrated into their devices,” said ReFirm Labs CEO and co-founder Terry Dunlap, an NSA veteran with deep experience in wireless network security. “ReFirm Labs’ Centrifuge Platform makes it possible to rapidly assess the security posture of a device at any point in the lifecycle chain, identifying backdoor accounts, hard-coded passwords and potential zero-day threats.” Other key members of the ReFirm Labs team include co-founder and CTO Peter Eacmen, a Naval Postgraduate School alumni and former Department of Defense cyber expert for the NSA, FBI, and US Special Forces; and Principal Research Engineer Craig Heffner, author of the open source firmware project “binwalk,” a tool for reverse engineering compiled firmware images of embedded systems, and Firmware Mod-Kit. Additionally, John Stewart, Chief Security Officer of Cisco and Jay Emmanuel, Chief Architect at DataTribe, joined the ReFirm Labs board of directors.[…]
https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/11/15/1193408/0/en/ReFirm-Labs-Announces-1-5-Million-in-Funding-From-Startup-Studio-DataTribe-and-Launches-Firmware-Validation-Platform.html
https://www.refirmlabs.com/
Firmware Security 