Neal Creighton

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Neal Creighton
Born
Panama Canal Zone, Panama
NationalityAmerican
Citizenship American
Alma mater
Occupation(s) President and CEO of CounterTack, Inc.
Known for

Neal Creighton is an American entrepreneur based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was one of the co-founders and CEO of certificate authority GeoTrust in 2001, and is co-inventor of the domain-validated certificate patent issued in 2006 which method accounts for 70 percent of all SSL certificates on the Internet. [1] [2] In 2006, GeoTrust was the 2nd largest certificate authority in the world with 26.7 percent market share according to independent survey company Netcraft. [3] He was also cofounder of RatePoint, Inc., which was named the MITX 2010 Social Media Company of the Year for New England. [4]

Contents

Creighton currently serves as President and CEO of CounterTack, Inc., a security software firm that focuses on preventing cyber-attacks. [5]

Early life and education

Creighton's father, Neal Creighton, Sr. was a career military officer and Major General in the United States Army known for his service during the Tet Offensive of 1968. [6] [7]

The younger Creighton attended US Army Ranger School [8] and West Point, and served for five years as an officer in the United States Army. He was an armor platoon leader and saw action during the Gulf War. Creighton was referenced by Seymour Hersh in his controversial New Yorker article, “Overwhelming Force” for his part in battle for Jalibah Airfield that took place on February 27, 1991. [9] After his service in the Army, Creighton attended Northwestern University, where he received a Juris Doctor and an MBA. [10]

Career

Equifax and GeoTrust

In the late 1990s, Creighton focused his work in fields of information security. [8] He began his career by cofounding GeoTrust in 2001. He led the efforts to raise $24 million in venture financing, and he and his partners acquired the security branch of Equifax. [8]

GeoTrust automated the identification verification of organizations, and computers over the Internet inventing the domain-validated certificate method. [11] [2] [12] In 2006, it was the 2nd largest certificate authority in the world with 26.7 percent market share according to independent survey company Netcraft. [3] [13] GeoTrust was sold to VeriSign in September 2006 for $125 million, and the brand was acquired by Symantec as part of its $1.28 billion acquisition of VeriSign's security business in 2010. [14]

ChosenSecurity and AffirmTrust

After GeoTrust, Creighton served as CEO of ChosenSecurity, which was acquired by PGP Corporation (which was later acquired by Symantec). [15] He was also cofounder and executive chairman of AffirmTrust LLC, which was acquired by Trend Micro in 2011. [16]

CounterTack, Inc.

Creighton currently serves as President and CEO of CounterTack, Inc., a real-time security software company that focuses on preventing cyber-attacks and managing Internet threats. [17] The Massachusetts-based company was formed in 2011 and has since raised $90 million in venture capital financing. [18] He also serves on the advisory board of the US Army Cyber Institute, [19] and is a former advisory board member for OneID. [20]

Ratepoint controversy

Creighton was the CEO and founder of Ratepoint, an email marketing firm, that raised $25 million in venture financing. He left Ratepoint in 2011 to pursue "other opportunities". [21] The company sold its email marketing business within a year to Constant Contact and its rating business was discontinued. By 2013, Creighton was chairman at Robly, a competitor to Ratepoint, which is an email marketing firm based out of New York City. [22] [23]

Patent

Creighton is the co-inventor of the domain-validated certificate patent granted in 2006, and was issued a patent in 2010 for a system that provides secure identity and uniform resource identifier verification. [24]

Related Research Articles

In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. This allows others to rely upon signatures or on assertions made about the private key that corresponds to the certified public key. A CA acts as a trusted third party—trusted both by the subject (owner) of the certificate and by the party relying upon the certificate. The format of these certificates is specified by the X.509 or EMV standard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSA Security</span> American computer security company

RSA Security LLC, formerly RSA Security, Inc. and trade name RSA, is an American computer and network security company with a focus on encryption and encryption standards. RSA was named after the initials of its co-founders, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, after whom the RSA public key cryptography algorithm was also named. Among its products is the SecurID authentication token. The BSAFE cryptography libraries were also initially owned by RSA. RSA is known for incorporating backdoors developed by the NSA in its products. It also organizes the annual RSA Conference, an information security conference.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Verisign</span> American Internet company

Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc country-code top-level domains, and the back-end systems for the .jobs and .edu sponsored top-level domains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gen Digital</span> Multinational software company

Gen Digital Inc. is a multinational software company co-headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and Prague, Czech Republic. The company provides cybersecurity software and services. Gen is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock-market index. The company also has development centers in Pune, Chennai and Bangalore. Its portfolio includes Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender, and CCleaner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trend Micro</span> Japanese multinational cyber security company

Trend Micro Inc. is an American-Japanese cyber security software company. The company has globally dispersed R&D in 16 locations across every continent excluding Antarctica. The company develops enterprise security software for servers, containers, & cloud computing environments, networks, and end points. Its cloud and virtualization security products provide automated security for customers of VMware, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

CyberTrust was a security services company formed in Virginia in November 2004 from the merger of TruSecure and Betrusted. Betrusted previously acquired GTE Cybertrust. Cybertrust acquired a large stake in Ubizen, a European security services firm based in Belgium, to become one of the largest information security firms in the world. It was acquired by Verizon Business in 2007. In 2015, the CyberTrust root certificates were acquired by DigiCert, Inc., a leading global Certificate Authority (CA) and provider of trusted identity and authentication services.

Thawte Consulting is a certificate authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa. As of December 30, 2016, its then-parent company, Symantec Group, was collectively the third largest public CA on the Internet with 17.2% market share.

Xcitium, formerly known as Comodo Security Solutions, Inc., is a cybersecurity company headquartered in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Verifone</span> Multinational point-of-sale equipment manufacturer

Verifone, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Coral Springs, Florida. Verifone provides technology for electronic payment transactions and value-added services at the point-of-sale. Verifone sells merchant-operated, consumer-facing and self-service payment systems to the financial, retail, hospitality, petroleum, government and healthcare industries. The company's products consist of POS electronic payment devices that run its own operating systems, security and encryption software, and certified payment software, and that are designed for both consumer-facing and unattended environments.

Barracuda Networks, Inc. is a company providing security, networking and storage products based on network appliances and cloud services. The company's security products include products for protection against email, web surfing, web hackers and instant messaging threats such as spam, spyware, trojans, and viruses. The company's networking and storage products include web filtering, load balancing, application delivery controllers, message archiving, NG firewalls, backup services and data protection.

GeoTrust is a digital certificate provider. The GeoTrust brand was bought by Symantec from Verisign in 2010, but agreed to sell the certificate business in August 2017 to private equity and growth capital firm Thoma Bravo LLC. GeoTrust was the first certificate authority to use the domain-validated certificate method which accounts for 70 percent of all SSL certificates on the Internet. By 2006, GeoTrust was the 2nd largest certificate authority in the world with 26.7 percent market share according to independent survey company Netcraft.

GlobalSign is a certificate authority and a provider of internet identity and security products. As of January 2015, Globalsign was the 4th largest certificate authority in the world, according to Netcraft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CyberArk</span> Israeli software company

CyberArk Software, Inc. is a publicly traded information security company offering identity management. The company's technology is utilized primarily in the financial services, energy, retail, healthcare and government markets. CyberArk is headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts. The company also has offices throughout the Americas, EMEA, Asia Pacific and Japan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DigiCert</span> Internet security company

DigiCert, Inc. is a digital security company headquartered in Lehi, Utah. DigiCert provides public key infrastructure (PKI) and validation required for issuing digital certificates or TLS/SSL certificates, acting as a certificate authority (CA) and trusted third party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moxie Marlinspike</span> American entrepreneur

Moxie Marlinspike is an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher. Marlinspike is the creator of Signal, co-founder of the Signal Technology Foundation, and served as the first CEO of Signal Messenger LLC. He is also a co-author of the Signal Protocol encryption used by Signal, WhatsApp, Google Messages, Facebook Messenger, and Skype.

Convergence was a proposed strategy for replacing SSL certificate authorities, first put forth by Moxie Marlinspike in August 2011 while giving a talk titled "SSL and the Future of Authenticity" at the Black Hat security conference. It was demonstrated with a Firefox addon and a server-side notary daemon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Veris Residential</span> American real estate investment trust

Veris Residential, Inc. is a real estate investment trust headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, investing primarily in multifamily real estate in New Jersey and Boston.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Domain-validated certificate</span>

A domain validated certificate (DV) is an X.509 public key certificate typically used for Transport Layer Security (TLS) where the domain name of the applicant is validated by proving some control over a DNS domain. Domain validated certificates were first distributed by GeoTrust in 2002 before becoming a widely accepted method.

Trustico is a dedicated SSL certificate provider, They are headquartered in the United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hostinger</span> Web hosting

Hostinger International Ltd is a web hosting company. Established in 2004, the company is headquartered in Lithuania and employs about 900 employees.

References

  1. ↑ Keith Regan (May 15, 2006). "GeoTrust CEO Neal Creighton on the Quest for Stronger Online Trust". E-Commerce Times. Tech News World. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  2. 1 2 "SSL Survey". Netcraft.
  3. 1 2 "VeriSign To Buy GeoTrust, Combining Top SSL Providers". Netcraft News.
  4. ↑ "RatePoint Recognized For Social Media Excellence At The 2010 MITX Technology Awards". TheStreet, Inc. June 4, 2010. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  5. ↑ "RatePoint helps manage companies' online reputations". Boston Business Journal . June 22, 2009. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  6. ↑ Kautz, Lydia (2020-10-13). "Son of former Fort Riley CG looks back on his father's life and time spent in this community". Junction City Union. Archived from the original on 2020-10-31. Retrieved 2024-03-08.
  7. ↑ "2005 Distinguished Graduate Award". West Point . Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  8. 1 2 3 "Neal Creighton CEO, RatePoint, Inc". iMedia Connection. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  9. ↑ Hersh, Seymour M. (15 May 2000). "Overwhelming Force". The New Yorker.
  10. ↑ "MHT All-Star Neal Creighton: Driven visionary". bizjournals.com. October 2010.
  11. ↑ "ChosenSecurity CEO Neal Creighton Named a Finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in New England". Sys-Con Media. April 25, 2007. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  12. ↑ "Top SSL Certificates Buyer's Guide". PCMAG.
  13. ↑ Erin Joyce (March 3, 2006). "Neal Creighton, CEO, GeoTrust". Internet News . Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  14. ↑ Joris Evers (May 17, 2006). "VeriSign nabs GeoTrust". CNET . Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  15. ↑ "PGP Corporation acquires TC TrustCenter and ChosenSecurity". Archived from the original on October 21, 2012. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  16. ↑ Don Seiffert (June 27, 2012). "AffirmTrust acquired by billion-dollar Japanese company". Boston Business Journal . Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  17. ↑ Don Seiffert (January 18, 2013). "CounterTack gets first patent for cyber attack protection software". Boston Business Journal . Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  18. ↑ Kelly O'Brien (May 30, 2017). "Waltham cybersecurity firm CounterTack tacks on $20M from strategic investors". Boston Business Journal . Retrieved May 31, 2017.
  19. ↑ "Advisors". cyber.army.mil.
  20. ↑ "Board of Directors". OneID . Archived from the original on 2013-04-26. Retrieved 2023-06-08.
  21. ↑ "Ex-Carbonite exec Cooper in as RatePoint CEO; Creighton leaves". bizjournals.com. March 2011.
  22. ↑ "Former RatePoint customers launch startup, Neal Creighton named chairman - Boston Business Journal". Archived from the original on 2013-06-23.
  23. ↑ Trends, Small Business. "RatePoint Customer Reviews Service Shutting Down". Business Insider.{{cite web}}: |first= has generic name (help)
  24. ↑ "Methods and Systems for Automated Authentication, Processing and Issuance of Digital Certificates". Google Patents . Retrieved January 22, 2013.
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