The Foundstone executive team is largely responsible for the best-selling and highly respected Hacking Exposed series including Hacking Exposed, Hacking Linux Exposed, Hacking Web Applications Exposed, Hacking Windows Server 2003 Exposed and more. Foundstone also has a slew of tools and utilities available for free to help you secure, test and monitor your network as well as conducting educational seminars such as the popular Ultimate Hacking course.
I had a chance to ask Stuart McClure, co-founder and currently President and CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Foundstone a few questions about the acquisition and what it means for the Foundstone team. According to McClure the Foundstone executive team will be taking on roles within McAfee once the acquisition is complete. He said "The team is going to be with McAfee for some time to come. We want to see the company and merged products succeed."
The authors of the various Hacking Exposed series of books will continue working on new and updated titles. In fact, according to McClure they are currently working on a 5th edition of the best-selling book that more or less created the genre of books- Hacking Exposed.
One of the things that Foundstone is known for is their educational seminars. Courses like Incident Response & Forensics, Cyber Law for Attorneys, Building Secure Software and the highly-respected Ultimate Hacking class have provided opportunities for thousands of I.T. and security professionals to expand their knowledge. I asked McClure whether those educational courses will be continued and he replied "Absolutely. McAfee believes in the role of education and training in a strong security practice. The classes will continue to flourish and new ones will most likely be offered."
Foundstone has a variety of tools and products they offer in addition to their actual service offerings. Some of the products like the FS100 appliance allow network administrators to manage and mitigate the business risks associated with digital vulnerabilities through asset discovery, inventory and prioritization; threat intelligence and correlation, and remediation tracking and reporting, but they cost money.
Foundstone is also very well known for the wide variety of free tools they offer such as SuperScan and FPort. Many network and security administrators have come to rely on these tools to monitor and secure their networks on a day to day basis. According to McClure these tools will still be available. "We believe that the Foundstone free tools are an integral part of a security administrators toolkit and we will continue to release these tools as we develop them."
There are some who feel that the convergence of network and security technologies is detrimental overall. The feeling is that by consolidating the available tools and technology into the hands of a few giant conglomerates the diversity of products and tools available is diminished. That may or may not turn out to be true, but this purchase will help McAfee cement its position as a leading player in the current security vendor and service provider arena.
