Napera

Wi-Fi security has been a challenge since the technology first came on the market. In 2001 the WEP protocol was shown to be fatally flawed, and was replaced by WPA in 2003. In 2004 the 802.11i standard for WPA2 became available and WEP was officially laid to rest.

With revelations this week of a Russian firm selling a GPU accelerated key cracker for WPA Pre-shared key mode (WPA-PSK, also known as personal mode) Wi-Fi security is in the headlines again. Brute force cracking is not new, but the speed of this attack checking hundreds of millions of passwords per second combined with the typical simplicity of shared WPA-PSK passwords supports the argument that WPA-PSK is  insufficient to protect commercial wireless networks.
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It’s been a busy summer here at Napera and I plan to get back into the blogging habit later this month. In the meantime, a couple of weeks ago I had the chance to chat with Mike Vizard of eWeek about managed security services, and the podcast is now up on the eWeek website.
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We’re excited to welcome our Asia Pacific and Central & Latin America sales teams to Napera. John Kirch, Mark Stevens and Heather Johnson joined us at Napera HQ in Seattle this week as we planned the roll out of Napera products to these international markets. John is heading up sales in Japan and South Korea. From Australia, Mark is covering the rest of Asia Pacific, while Heather is responsible for Central and Latin America. Each of them will be working closely with Napera partners in their local markets. In a small twist of fate, it was Mark who introduced me to the WatchGuard products in 1997 and is indirectly responsible for me moving to the US to work with WatchGuard in 1998.
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Chris just sent me a great new article at Tech Target from Lisa Phifer on the topic of Securing the New Network. Lisa gives an excellent summary of the state of the art in a couple of intersecting areas such UTM’s, VPN’s and NAC and a couple of relevant quotes caught my eye.

When IDC surveyed enterprises about pressing security challenges for 2007, growing attack sophistication, lack of employee adherence to security policy, and increasing complexity of security solutions and network traffic were top concerns…
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We’re excited to welcome Pierre Blom and Austin Wright, our brand new European sales team. We convened at Napera HQ on Mercer Island this week to plan our European launch.
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Attending a tradeshow forces you to condense your message so you can concisely answer people who ask about your company. After talking to a hundred or so people this week, I got the Napera story down to the following five points.
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It’s been 482 days since the founders of Napera put our commitment to this company on paper. This morning we kicked off our official launch, and we’ll be busy through May with tradeshows and press engagements. Finally, our product details are out there!

We created the Napera product line to solve the network health challenge for the small and medium enterprise (SME). As a team, our focus is 100% on that customer. There are over a million SME’s worldwide, but they receive scant attention from enterprise networking vendors. Our earliest meetings with customers in fall 2006 confirmed our suspicions. IT managers want to protect their IT investment from rogue, malicious or careless network users. There was no compelling SME solution in 2006 and the situation remains unchanged today.
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Napera will be out in force at RSA 2008 in San Francisco from April 7th to 11th. We are looking forward to showing off our product line and catching up with friends old and new. If you’d like to meet, please visit us at booth 123 at the Moscone Center.

Chris and I will also be at the RSA 2008 Security Bloggers Meet-Up on April 9th. Subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on live streaming!

My friend Kevin Merritt (CEO of Seattle startup blist) hit the nail on the head with his recent post about the hordes of people who will call you when you announce a financing.

I’ve noticed the same thing since we came out of stealth mode two weeks ago. A lot of people are calling to help us spend the piles of money they assume we have lying around the Napera offices. As Kevin noted, the number one callers at the moment are recruiters. We’ve been lucky at Napera in that we’ve only used a recruiter once and we’ve found social networking sites like LinkedIn have been more effective at finding great people to join our team. So recruiters, real estate brokers, PR agencies and offshore developers please note – we have those bases covered!
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A recent survey published at Dark Reading confirms what customers have been telling us for over a year. According to the survey, “70 percent of shoppers don’t understand the significance of the green browser bar, and 20 percent of those questioned do not understand what the golden security padlock represents.”
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