You may have heard that there was news on how anti-virus could be used as a door for a hacker. Seems weird, doesn’t it? But, this news was true and iViz was the organization which discovered it. Started by two geeks of IIT Kharagpur, Bikash Barai who started reading books on quantum physics and relativity as early as class 6 and Nilanjan De, who knew every person in IIT campus by their IP address, iViZ Security is industry’s first cloud-based penetration testing service for web applications.
Bikash born in Bandel, a small town near Kolkata, joined IIT Kharagpur in 2000 to pursue B.Tech and M.Tech dual degree course in Computer Science and Engineering. He was very active at IIT and represented IIT Kharagpur in Inter IIT socult competition, held only once in the history. His favourite subject was physics, apart from it he had just one more love- Painting. It was his keen interest in painting that led him to do minor in Architecture. In 2002,he launched a web portal with one other person named ‘bestfromIndia.com’, this web portal was dedicated to Indian arts. The portal succeeded immediately and was even ranked no.1 in any search related to Indian arts by Google. The portal was able to sell many paintings of reputed artists like M. F. Hussain and Jamini Roy besides some of his paintings. The venture had been started more for philanthropic reasons than for moneymaking. However, he decided to discontinue this venture because he realized that it will not be able to sustain in long run.
It was at this time that he started working with Nilanjan on creating a tool based on Artificial Intelligence. Till 2004, both researched on their product. Even after getting their respective degrees, they stayed back at campus to develop their product. Their company iViz came into existence in 2005, though it really started working in 2006. Besides getting motivation by fellow IITians, they received tremendous support from professors like A. Gupta and P. P. Chakrabarti who helped them with their research work and company strategies. However, his parents were not comfortable with his idea of starting his own business. Strengthening their concern was the fact that he believed that for being an entrepreneur no B plan is required. The absence of alternative plan led you to figure it all out yourself. ‘Getting into entrepreneurship is not something you can first learn in some classroom simulation and then practise the real thing outside. You have to practise it and learn things at the same time’ he says. In 2005 iViz raised an amount of Rs 1.5 crore from US-based eRevMax Technologies and this is how iViz got their first Angel Investor.
While conducting one conventional penetration testing exercise, it dawned on him that even as a security expert; they cannot comprehensively detect all multi-stage attack path possibilities. Especially, once a network is successfully broken into, they tend to become complacent and the mental incentive to find all and every ways to penetrate diminishes. To overcome this barrier related to basic human instinct, he explored the usage of Artificial Intelligence to simulate all multi stage attack possibilities. A prototype was built & refined over next 9 months and stabilized after testing it in several environments. Thus, the automated penetration testing product was born. This technology is currently under “patent pending” with USPTO (United States Patents & Trademark Office). After successful installation of the product in a few client organizations, he realized that it is extremely difficult for an organization to hire good security persons and it is more difficult to retain them and hence they don’t have enough people to run the tool. He felt that a penetration testing which can be done anytime, anywhere and anyhow is the need of the day. They decided to leave the software approach and adopted the emerging Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. Thus, the world’s first On Demand Penetration Testing was born!
Throughout their journey, Bikash and Nilanjan realized that customer do not want to see how different or unique your idea is? What they want from you is how you address their problem and come out with a solution, they want their basic needs to be addressed. Today, iViz has offices in 20 countries around the world including offices in Boston, London and Bengaluru. Within just 4 years of its launch, iViz became one of the hottest IT start-ups in India, having received reviews around the globe. Within few years, iViz is expected to become a $30 million enterprise, a pioneer in field of on-demand security.
Next time you need to safeguard yourself from Hackers, remember iViz is out there for your help to keep you one step ahead of hackers.
