Window Snyder’s Startup Thistle Technologies to Secure IoT Devices

The IoT has come up with a security problem over the past few decades. The past decade has seen wave after wave of new internet-connected devices, from sensors through to webcams and smart home techs often manufactured in bulks but installed with little device security.

Security veteran Window Snyder thinks there might be a better way to address this issue. Her new startup, Thistle Technologies, is backed with $2.5 million in seed funding from True Venture with the goal of assisting the IoT manufacturers reliably and securely deliver software updates to their devices.

“We’re building the means so that they don’t have to do it themselves. They want to spend the time building customer-facing features anyway,” said Snyder. Prior to founding Thistle, Snyder worked in senior cybersecurity positions at Apple, Intel, and Microsoft, and also served as a chief security officer at Mozilla, Square, and Fastly.Thistle will develop frameworks that allow device manufacturers to quickly build reliable and resilient security into their products more quickly than they could on their own. The company’s initial focal point will be on building a platform that delivers security updates to connected devices.

The Silicon Valley Venture capital firm, True Venture has previously provided funding to hundreds of early age startups, including Duo Security, the company that provides two factor authentication and other Security services and is now owned by Cisco. Thistle Technologies is looking to expand its worth in cloud security programs, which will enable the devices to stay away from the threat of cyberattacks from the hackers.

Snyder thinks that the potential risk of exploitation of devices is much higher when compared to 100 million devices. He said that among these devices if you’ve got a percent failure rate, which is quite low for updates, that’s still a million devices that are bricked potentially. He is varying the threat and the risk of hacks and instilling a viable security program to address the issue.