Manisha Prashar and Gurjant Singh are the co-founders of Defense Station, which is now in stage two of Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst’s Cyber Challenge go-to-market program. Defense Station is a single integrated platform to automate all of an organization’s cybersecurity needs, making it simple and reducing time and resource spend.
Learn more about Defense Station on their website: DefenseStation.com.
- What’s your secret (or not-so-secret) origin story? What made you want to build a cybersecurity solution?
I’ve been hacking and playing with computers since I was a child. Working in the industry as an adult has pushed me to build Defense Station, to address a lot of gaps and issues I was seeing around cybersecurity.
When people are building a startup, there’s a lean startup strategy: they might move quickly to find their product market fit. Which is great, I think you should do that. But the problem there is, now [they are] in a cycle of quick growth, and there’s nothing done in their cybersecurity. It’s literally like you have built a ship, and it’s in the middle of the sea now, and it’s leaking. And that’s when you say, “oh s***, I shouldn’t be leaking.”
What we want to do [at Defense Station] is to build the cybersecurity tools in a single platform. This lets [clients] build their cybersecurity infrastructure from day one.
- Pitch your startup to us as if we’re an individual or organization that thinks cyber crime is “someone else’s problem.”
Cyber attacks don’t discriminate: they target everyone, from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, and cause an average loss of $4.35M per breach.
Defense Station provides an all-in-one cybersecurity solution that protects your critical data, reputation, and bottom line without requiring deep technical expertise. Our ecosystem continuously monitors threats, automates security responses, and maintains compliance — all for less than the cost of a single data breach.
- What’s the best question you’ve been asked about your startup?
“Why are you building everything from scratch?” [laughs]
To answer that question, let me teach you hacking in one minute: it’s only about knowledge. That’s it. If I know something more about your system — who it’s developed by, or somebody who’s using it — then I can take it down. What that means is, when you are building a web site or a product, there’s a lot of stack there — the internet, the servers, the libraries, the technologies, that are put together. One admin cannot know all of it, and [a hacker] will always know more than you do about off-the-shelf products. If you’ve misconfigured it somehow, if you’ve missed one step, as a hacker, I can take it down.
At Defense Station, our objective was to build a platform that does things in the right manner, and to take our time to do security right from day one. And so, a lot of products that we could have used off the shelf, were not appropriate because of the security concerns. So it cost us a lot of time, but we built literally everything from scratch.
- What’s something that’s being overlooked in the cybersecurity industry right now?
Compliance is not security. A lot of organizations get this wrong.
In fact, people have actually harmed their security through compliance. They’ve standardized the security processes into a compliance checklist, and once you do that, organizations start believing that they’re secure, while what they actually have is a false sense of security. [This approach has] compromised a lot of companies.
When cyber companies come to us, I ask them: do you want to do security right, so that compliance will be a byproduct [of making the right security decisions in advance]? Or do you just want to have a checklist? And if they say “checklist,” we don’t want to work with them anymore.
- How is the Cyber Challenge helping you right now?
Cyber Challenge has been a big help with resources, mentoring, and making connections in the industry. It’s so much more than any other incubator. No one else creates such unique challenges for startups, and helps them each individually.
