applied security research
Erik Remmelzwaal - 06 jan 2021

#CES2021 – We Are Ready!

We are very excited to be part of the #CES2021NL mission! Meet us at CES (Januari 11-14) in our online booth 10609 and see how we solve global challenges with NLTech.

Erik Remmelzwaal, Co-Founder & CEO

Yes I indeed think we are ready for CES. At this virtual event we will showcase Zolder.App. I am convinced that this solution is a game-changer to the cybersecurity industry. It depends on who you are and what your role is as to how I need to explain this, because the ‘changing the game’ happens in a couple of ways. So let me simply elaborate on all of them.

By the way, if you were just looking for more info on our solution, I suggest you click onwards to the landing page: https://zolder.app.

Game-Changing for Customers

First of all, the most important viewpoint is that of customers. In my cybersecurity career I have mostly dealt with large enterprises. Including the largest and world-leading ones in The Netherlands. To be clear: a large enterprise in the EU is any organization with over 250 employees. Everything below that is considered SME. And the SME makes up 99.8% of all enterprises in the EU, covering 60% of added gross value.

Source: Eurostat (https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/submitViewTableAction.do

Working with big brands and complex organizations was all fun and games, but as a business owner I have always been looking for ways to give proper support to small & medium businesses as well. That really wasn’t possible, as cybersecurity services are generally very tailor made and labor intensive. And I know – from working with partners/competitors – that I wasn’t the only one: there simply is no proper security service offering available to small & medium businesses. Too expensive to get a good expert in that will help you fix problems.

And so most SME’s rely on generic IT suppliers to – at best – cover security as a side offering. The result is not surprising. in December 2020 the EU published a report stating:

Over two-thirds of companies, in particular SMEs, are considered ‘novices’ in cybersecurity, and European companies are considered less well prepared than companies in Asia and America.

The EU’s cybersecurity strategy for the digital decade, Brussels 16.12.2020

Personally I consider this situation – the “Cyber n00biness of SME” – to be a global challenge, as it undermines any perceived solution coming from digitalization to solve other global challenges at all. If we can solve climate change, pandemics, famine or bifurcation with robotics or what have you, but the organizations driving that innovation are not capable to protect these innovations, we will fail.

Zolder.App changes this situation because it is low-cost and easy to understand. The latter might seem irrelevant in this viewpoint but it is the only way this solution will work. As for business owners of the smallest companies require simple language and explanations with their cyber solutions. Huge dashboards and drill down tables really do not fill that need.

The low-cost feature of Zolder.App of course is the bigger ticket here. For only 20 Euro per month, a business can get on-board. And that is an actual service with actual world-class cybersecurity experts providing actual protection. That’s so cheap that one might think it can’t be good, but they will be surprised. The reason why we are able to do this, is because of hyper-scale…

Game-Changing for Scalability

For the same reasons as set out above, managed security service providers (MSSPs) generally have a hard time scaling their solution. This stems from the old days in which every company had it’s own server room or data center, thus company-specific infrastructure. Supporting such environments as an MSSP results in tailor-made services and labor intensive processes. Once your service organization is setup like that it will be very hard to transform it to make use of the possibilities of the future. After all: employees performing human labor are not automatically able to write code to rule themselves out, nor do they want to.

At Zolder we had the opportunity to start from scratch. And we decided to fully embrace that opportunity to tackle the scalability problem. And so our customer is one that uses Microsoft 365 for office automation. We will support other cloud providers later on, but for the sake of this argument consider it’s all M365. What this allows us to do is build an infrastructure that connects to 1 cloud service, create security content (a bunch of scripts) to assess and monitor that service and then apply it to all customers at once.

So if we – or others, like MITRE ATT&CK – discover a new attack tactic, we build scripts to cover it. Test them in our own tenants, apply them to customers that signed up for early testing, and then roll them out to all others. This is 1 effort supporting all customers whether we have onboarded 1, 10, 100, 1000 or 100000000. The amount of work is no longer depending on the amount of customers, but on the amount of threats we need to protect them from. That’s game changing, as it allows us to rethink positioning.

Game-Changing for Marketing

Marketing? Yes marketing. You see, what we have to sell is expertise. The SERVICES part of the cybersecurity industry has grown used to the idea that this expertise can be monetized either by providing professional or managed services, that’s basically it. I don’t believe that ground belief is in-line with the promises of digital transformation we are in. There’s a lot more we can do with expertise, it however might still need to be invented.

So one of the focal points in talking to my co-owners of how we wanted to setup Zolder was to stress that first and foremost we would need to be experts. And do expert things. So we do what we love most: we research digital stuff, we blog about it, talk about it and podcast about it. In doing so we get into contact with interesting and interested people and they might come up with new ideas in which we could help out and monetize our expertise. That actually already payed off and so have we been able to get to this point without any external investment AND have a couple other ideas under our sleeves.

Value Disciplines – Treacy and Wiersema. Image credit: business-to-you.com

For Zolder.App in particular we are able to take another positioning approach. Again for all the reasons above, basically all MSSPs are built on the value discipline of Customer Intimacy. Not surprising as they need to have outstanding customer services and relations to be able to properly support the customer-specific situations they’re dealing with. This way of working of course requires even more human labor and makes these services unaffordable for SME. And so to game-change that situation, we would need to take the opposite route, being a mix of Product Leadership and Operational Excellence. The latter obviously is proven by the low-cost feature of Zolder.App, and the proces-automation as the enabler for it. But the cybersecurity expertise we’re bringing to the table is genuinely world-class. Furthermore the way Zolder.App provides actionable advise is a very important feature as well, unparalleled even. And so the quality of our solution gives it a bit of product leadership taste as well.

Point being: can a service be marketed in any other way than customer intimacy? I believe that digitalization allows us to do so. You only need the capability to make use of the possibilities of the future and get rid of old habits. Like we did 🙂

Come to think of it. I guess what we are launching requires a new term. It is not a managed service. Not a software-as-a-service. But actually it is a Service-as-a-Software. Let me elaborate on that in the next blog 😉 Stay Tuned!

Blogs

Internetoplichters richten pijlen op Hockeyvereniging

Erik Remmelzwaal - 10 mrt 2023
De penningmeester van Hockeyclub Zevenbergen ontving een poging tot oplichting. Gelukkig werd het herkend, maar zal dat overal gebeuren, nu internetoplichters hun pijlen blijkbaar op sportverenigingen hebben gericht? Lees verder

Microsoft Digital Defense Report

Erik Remmelzwaal - 14 nov 2022
Het Digital Defense Report 2022 van Microsoft is uitgekomen. Wat zijn de highlights en key takeaways? Lees verder

TBX2022 Throwback & Masterclass

Erik Remmelzwaal - 07 nov 2022
Op 2 en 3 november vond in de Jaarbeurs Utrecht de TBX2022 beurs plaats. Zolder was net als vorig jaar aanwezig als exposant, en was op beide dagen de host van een masterclass. Ons voornaamste doel was om ons nieuwe propositie van Attic for MSPs bekend te maken. Met deze nieuwe release, stellen we andere […] Lees verder

Hacking my Helium Crypto Miner

Wesley Neelen - 05 sep 2022
Recently I came across an interesting cryptocurrency project called Helium. Its a wireless network built by people all around the world. The people that help expanding the network by adding a hotspot receive the Helium cryptocurrency coin by providing the coverage. During my research I decided to order one of those Helium miners. I ordered […] Lees verder

PEN-300 / OSEP review

Wesley Neelen - 19 jul 2022
This year I decided to start a new study, the PEN-300 course of Offensive Security. In 2012 I did the OSCP course and in 2013 OSCE. In 2016 I took the OSEE class in Vegas, unfortunately never took the exam (one of my biggest mistakes ever🥴). I liked all the courses very much at that […] Lees verder

Deze 3 misverstanden blokkeren het ontwikkelen van cyberweerbaarheid

Zolder B.V. - 04 jul 2022
Het NCTV heeft weer het jaarlijkse Cybersecuritybeeld Nederland gepubliceerd. Het CSBN-2022. Mooie aanleiding om eens op te schrijven waar ik al langer mee in mijn hoofd zit. Drie hardnekkige en foute aannames die mensen hebben bij digitale dreigingen. Drie misverstanden dus, die in mijn ervaring de belangrijkste reden zijn dat we nauwelijks vooruit komen met […] Lees verder

Cyberweerbaarheid en Operational Technology

Erik Remmelzwaal - 02 jun 2022
Onlangs nam Erik Remmelzwaal, co-owner en Managing Director van Zolder BV, deel aan een tafelgesprek van Data Value Center – Smart Industry (DVC-SI). Het thema was Cyberweerbaarheid en Operational Technology, en het gesprek werd opgenomen in de campus van Breda Robotics, waar Zolder lid van is. De opname is inmiddels beschikbaar en terug te kijken […] Lees verder

Detecting MFASweep using Azure Sentinel

Zolder B.V. - 01 nov 2021
Many companies are using cloud services such as Microsoft 365 for email, file sharing and communicating. If an attacker gains access to valid credentials that allows them to authenticate to the account, all information within the account is usually instantly accessible. Therefor, implementing multi factor authentication is one of the most important steps while securing […] Lees verder

Public SharePoint sites - the new open shares

Wesley Neelen - 16 sep 2021
During one of our engagements we were investigating a Microsoft 365 environment. My colleague Rik discovered that many SharePoint sites were publicly available within the organization. We were surprised by the amount sites that were wide open this way. A lot of sensitive information was located on those sites, for example PII-information and passwords for […] Lees verder

Decrypt passwords from Xerox Workcentre config backups

Rik van Duijn - 29 aug 2021
During a recent engagement we encountered Xerox WorkCentre printers using default credentials (admin:1111). Usually it’s just another finding, but this time we noticed the printer had SMB and e-mail credentials configured. For LDAP we usually point the printer to our own IP and get access to the plaintext creds that way. But in the case […] Lees verder

Office 365 audit logging

Rik van Duijn - 19 aug 2021
It’s important to enable audit logging for o365 even if you are not monitoring them actively. Atleast if you get hacked there’s logging to investigate :). The audit log is not always enabled by default, it seems to rely on license levels. However there are some important things to take into consideration. You can enable […] Lees verder

Ransomware, nationale crisis?

Erik Remmelzwaal - 04 aug 2021
Als er 1 digitale dreiging is die veel in het nieuws komt, dan is het ransomware. Er wordt zelfs gesproken van een nationale crisis. Lees verder

Mijlpalen en hoe het gaat

Zolder B.V. - 02 jul 2021
Vandaag gebeurden er op Zolder toch een paar dingen die blogwaardig zijn. Dus prima aanleiding om nog maar eens de laptop open te klappen en te vertellen hoe het gaat. Nieuwe collega’s Het is 1 juli 2021 en we zijn ruim een jaartje onderweg als Zolder. De belangrijkste stap die we vandaag zetten, is dat […] Lees verder

Zolder wordt hoofdsponsor HCZ

Zolder B.V. - 01 jul 2021
Vandaag is bekend geworden dat Zolder de nieuwe hoofdsponsor is van HCZ – Hockeyclub Zevenbergen. De komende drie seizoenen zal het logo van Zolder daarom voorop de shirts van alle HCZ leden prijken. We zijn heel erg trots op deze nieuwe stap voor ons jonge bedrijf, en hopen zo de relatie met onze regio te […] Lees verder

Breda Robotics

Erik Remmelzwaal - 10 mei 2021
Zolder BV is toegetreden tot het netwerk van Breda Robotics. Deze vereniging brengt organisaties bij elkaar die actief zijn rondom robotisering in de regio West-Brabant. Voor Zolder geeft Breda Robotics de mogelijkheid om samen te werken met de robotiseringsindustrie. Te begrijpen hoe die sector precies werk en op welke vlakken cybersecurity kennis kan worden ingezet […] Lees verder

27% .nl domeinen slecht beschermd tegen spoofing

Erik Remmelzwaal - 29 apr 2021
TLDR: We scanden de DNS records van 1,6 miljoen .nl domeinen en vonden uit: 9% is rechtstreeks gekoppeld aan Microsoft 365, daarmee is Microsoft veruit de grootste Google is nr2 en heeft 4% van de domeinen aan zich verbonden, nagenoeg gelijk aan een aantal andere spelers. Van alle mail-enabled domeinen heeft 27% geen SPF record […] Lees verder

Zolder biedt MKB betaalbare en eenvoudige security-app

Zolder B.V. - 12 apr 2021
“Attic voorkomt dat security een luchtbel wordt” Security is bij mkb-bedrijven vaak het ondergeschoven kindje. Ze hebben er de mensen en het budget niet voor. Dat maakt deze doelgroep een aantrekkelijk doelwit voor cybercriminelen. Voor de vier doorgewinterde cybersecurity-experts van start-up Zolder reden om Attic te introduceren. Deze eenvoudige, goedkope en toekomstbestendige app maakt mkb’ers […] Lees verder

Nieuwe Themesong voor Zoldersessions

Erik Remmelzwaal - 13 mrt 2021
Ik vond het tijd worden voor een nieuw liedje voor onze Zoldersessions. Tot nu toe hadden we er een rechtenvrij liedje onder staan, namelijk EVA_失望した, maar wilden toch iets meer 'eigens'. Daar schakelden we Bjørgen van Essen voor in met dit eindresultaat. Dit is hoe dat tot stand kwam. Lees verder

Zolder.App Open Beta

Zolder B.V. - 02 feb 2021
We launched the final beta release to the Google and Apple appstores. Any business running on Microsoft 365 is more than welcome to join. As a beta-tester you will receive a free subscription to the Zolder.App Premium Plan for the remainder of the beta phase, which is scheduled to run through April 30th 2021. Zolder.App […] Lees verder

GGD data is topje van ijsberg

Erik Remmelzwaal - 26 jan 2021
Maandag kwam RTL Nieuws, na onderzoek van Daniël Verlaan, naar buiten met het nieuws dat gestolen data van de GGD online wordt verhandeld door criminelen. Het gaat om data die onderdeel uitmaakt van het bron- en contactonderzoek dat de GGD uitvoert als onderdeel van de bestrijding van Corona/COVID-19. De data bevat gevoelige persoonsgegevens en criminelen […] Lees verder