Cyber Security Strategy
From Founding of PageSeal to Integration with PerimeterX
Imagine you're walking into an electronics store to buy a TV. A sales person shows you the different models, you come to a conclusion and you're even happy with the price. But just as you're walking over to the cashier, someone from a competitive store approaches you to offer you that same TV for a better price. Obviously, Store 1 would never let that happen in a brick-and-mortar store, but online, it happens all the time. Customers are simply stolen from one website and led to another, often without knowing it. Many eCommerce websites don’t even realize that it's happening to them, until it's too late.
Add to that other bad actors, affiliate scammers, and malware-injectors and you have a picture of the world of browser extensions and client-side malware.
We started the company PageSeal with our main vision and goal to create a product that protects eCommerce websites and their customers from falling into these traps and to create a perfect flow and experience for them.
After years and years of studying these phenomena, we knew all the “tricks” and underhanded methods used by many of these extensions. Some pose as good actors – “just trying to speed up your slow computer.” Others come bundled with seemingly good tools, like anti-virus software!
And while it is of course true that not all extensions are harmful, many of them can significantly hurt revenue, conversion, and engagement.
As we launched the PageSeal product in early 2018, it became very evident that our first challenge would be market education. Most website owners, even large ones, were unaware of the problem and equally unaware of the benefits of our solution. As you can imagine, market education takes a long time and costs a lot – both tough things for a seed-level startup.
We started to go to a few of the eCommerce shows and began getting the message across – albeit, slowly! We even landed a number of paying customers – including a few well-known brands.
As seasoned entrepreneurs know, the name of the game in startups is scale. And fast. Without fast scale, it is very hard to raise capital – certainly the size of capital that will matter.
And that’s when we met PerimeterX. It was “love at first site.” The synergies were obvious from day one - they had everything that we had hoped for in a partner. In the tech world, one might say that the competitor of my competitor is my partner. This was certainly true in this case. Add to that the fact that PerimeterX had a perfect list of existing customers that already valued and trusted their products – and the match was made.
With a few options on the table, we specifically chose to join forces with PerimeterX – seeing the obvious ability to scale quickly and bring our product to a large customer base from our first day as part of PerimeterX.
Other than the trusted vendor benefit – which is not to be trivialized - customers that are being protected through web-page interactions want MAX protection under a single JavaScript snippet. That is, managing multiple vendors, multiple JavaScripts, and multiple protections is a nightmare for a website owner. And therefore, receiving all possible protections from one source is the most streamlined, perfect solution for customers.
We at PageSeal and the phenomenal team at PerimeterX, identified this synergy right away and albeit cliché, truly realized that 1 + 1 = 3.
We are looking forward to the months and years to come as part of the PerimeterX team. And we are thrilled to introduce today, PerimeterX Page Defender!