Cybersecurity with Leonard Moodispaw, Chairman & CEO of KEYW

Joining me today on PowerTalk is Leonard Moodispaw - Chairman and CEO of KEYW Holding Corp. (KEYW), a publicly traded company that provides cybersecurity, and geospatial intelligence solutions for U.S. Government,  intelligence and defense customers as well as  commercial enterprises. 

As we move more and more of our lives into the digital frontier, it exposes us to a different set of risks. Whether your a person, a business or a government, the way in which you need to secure yourself is far different than it was 2-3 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. 

What I just described is the downside of my Always On, Always Connected PowerTrend

Cyber attacks, including website and email hacking, malware infection and targeted denial of service, are being increasingly reported by private users and government departments

How big of a threat is it?

Companies such as Google (GOOG), Twitter, Facebook (FB), Evernote, and recently Adobe (ADBE) have all reported being hacked. In fact, Adobe said it suffered a massive security breach which compromised the IDs, passwords, and credit card information of nearly three million customers.

That’s pretty bad, but it gets worse.

As Verizon (VZ) noted in its 2013 Data Breach Investigation Report, it experienced more than 47,000 reported security incidents and 621 confirmed data breaches last year. Over the entire nine-year range of this study, that tally now exceeds 2,500 data breaches and 1.1 billion compromised records .

With that as a backdrop, does it come as a surprise that The Department of Homeland Security awarded a $6 billion contract to 17 companies to protect the government against cybersecurity threats?

That’s good new for KEYW. While it’s list of intelligence community customers may sound like a lot of alphabet soup, it’s important to realize that it includes NSA, NRO, NGA, AGC and other agencies within the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense (DoD). Winning business from those customers and others led KEYW to deliver revenues of $240 million last year -- that’s up substantially from the $39 million in revenue it achieved in 2009. 

During our time together, Leonard and I talk about what’s going on in the cybersecurity market, how KEYW has been able to deliver that great revenue growth, a new KEYW product offering -- HawkEye G, the industry’s first truly active defense solution to detect stealthy advanced threats, and more

While KEYW may not be a mainstream name today, once you listen to today’s PowerTalk I suspect you’ll be wanting to know more about the company.