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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1209879
In an industry as fast-moving as cybersecurity, it's rare to find companies with real staying power. SecureMac, a Mac security firm out of Las Vegas, Nevada, is such a company: They've been in business for 20 years now. Over the past two decades, SecureMac has faced numerous challenges and constant change, but has nevertheless managed to thrive — and company founder Nicholas Raba says they're just getting started. SecureMac began in 1999, when only 50% of adult Americans were even online. At the time, most people were under the mistaken impression that Macs were impervious to computer viruses (a misunderstanding Apple's marketing department was only too happy to encourage). And the few Mac users who knew better had no place to turn for reliable Mac security news and updates. Raba founded SecureMac in order to fill this gap in the marketplace — and to raise awareness of Mac security issues generally. But as he would soon find out, there were other needs waiting to be addressed as well. SecureMac's lively user forums had started to tell a consistent story: Mac owners were increasingly aware that their machines were not immune to security issues, and they were dissatisfied with the native security solutions available to them. Raba's team then started on a new project with lead developer Nicholas Ptacek: a third-party malware detection and removal tool for macOS. In 2005, after months of hard work, their efforts paid off : MacScan was released to the world. The app was a hit, and SecureMac saw its user base and website readership increase rapidly. The company continued to develop MacScan, adding new features and updating its ever-expanding list of malware definitions. They also began to delve into serious malware research, and were soon credited with discovering such major threats as the Boonana Trojan and OSX /CoinThief. A . As the years went by, the world started to change — and SecureMac realized it would have to change as well if it wanted to keep its users safe. The dominance of companies like Facebook and Amazon made it clear that executives in corporate boardrooms were as much a threat to digital privacy as basement- dwelling hackers had ever been. Digital advertisers were proving relentless in their quest to build marketing profiles of potential customers, tracking people's web activity, storing their personal data, and even monitoring their physical location. SecureMac started engineering a new product — one designed to deal with this growing privacy threat. The result was PrivacyScan, a macOS tool which offered users a simple way to find and delete tracking cookies and other privacy threats from their systems. Within a year of its 2012 release, PrivacyScan had earned industry recognition on both sides of the Atlantic, winning "Best of Show" at the 2012 Macworld/iWorld Conference and Expo, and being shortlisted for "Best Consumer Software" at the Macworld UK Awards in 2013. Since then, SecureMac has continued to develop and refine its software, regularly updating PrivacyScan and releasing a completely rebuilt MacScan 3.0 in 2016. But Raba and his team worried about the continuing lack of cybersecurity awareness among the general public, especially as nation-state actors and organized cybercrime rings were targeting macOS with greater frequency and ever more sophisticated attacks. For this reason, Raba made the decision to significantly expand SecureMac's news and educational offerings. In 2016, the company debuted a weekly Apple security podcast called The Checklist, which has now recorded over 170 episodes. In 2019, SecureMac began producing a series of interviews with cybersecurity experts with the aim of making the perspective and knowledge of industry insiders available to a wider audience. As SecureMac looks ahead to its next decade, Raba is optimistic: "We're working every day to improve MacScan and PrivacyScan, and beyond that, we have plans to continue growing the news and education side of our site. We're also hoping to expand our malware research database in 2020 in order to share what we've learned — and contribute to the work of other third-party security researchers. In a way, that's really where we're headed. We aren't just building software anymore. We're building a community".