There’s no need to explain why protecting your Wi-Fi is important for your business and home usage. With more and more connected devices and the growing number of cyberattacks, having a protected connection is fundamental.
To know more about how we can protect our connected devices and guarantee our security we talked with Mehul Patel, CEO of Minim, a company that despite being 5 years old, has a long journey in the telecom industry. Check out the interview for Cyberghost below.
Minim was born in 1977. How can a big company stay relevant for so much time in such a dynamic industry?
Actually, Minim was founded fairly recently in 2017. In December of 2020, the company completed a successful merger with Zoom Telephonics, creator of internet access products under the Motorola brand, which was founded in 1977. As a result of this merger, Minim obtained an exclusive license from Motorola to develop and produce networking devices under its globally recognized brand, which brings us today.
Now, Minim, Inc. is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ that develops an intuitive software solution called Minim, which powers all of the devices in the Motorola home networking portfolio as the motosync mobile app. The company has remained relevant not only through its ongoing partnership with an iconic consumer electronics brand like Motorola, but through our team’s dedication to innovation. While Zoom Telephonics established the Motorola brand for its cable modems and gateways, Minim’s innovative approach to network management and focus on emerging technologies like mesh WiFi have ensured the company remains at the forefront of the telecoms industry.
What inspired the necessity to create the company to solve a problem that wasn’t being solved by other companies in the market?
You need to remember the big hike and spike of Internet booming around that time. I mentioned that Minim was founded in 2017, but our founder Jeremy Hitchcock’s story actually started a year earlier in 2016. At that time, Jeremy was the CEO of Dyn, which became the victim of an infamous DDoS attack that leveraged 600,000 connected IoT devices on the Dyn network to disrupt Internet platforms and services worldwide. Recognizing the threat this posed to connected homes and offices around the world, he created Minim, a company that provides users with a software platform that extends network management to include vulnerable IoT devices.
The whole goal behind the app and software being thought about back then was to make everything easier for an average consumer and to make sure they feel confident when they are connected to the Internet.
With so many connected devices and exponential cybersecurity threats, how can you guarantee security in such a complex environment?
Unfortunately, complete cybersecurity is never a guarantee, but Minim is able to offer a solution that allows our users to feel more confident in what they have. The Minim app and platform identify any issue from thousands of known vulnerabilities in Minim-enabled products and devices, and provides information that’s easy to understand about what’s happening and where. It gives you a pinpoint in terms of what devices are potentially under attack.
Although VPNs are a valuable resource to cover IP addresses, the Minim app takes this a step further with issue tracking. This enables users to chase down anything happening within their network and react fast, separating us from many other services.
In a nutshell, how does your threat protection work?
The Minim solution hardens a users’; network by avoiding threats at their source: IoT devices. In the current cyberthreat landscape, a bad actor is more likely to infiltrate a personal network through a less secure connected smart home device, like a washing machine. The Minim app avoids this issue through device fingerprinting, providing a pinpoint where a cyberattack is happening,allowing a user within a system to identify threats on a real-time basis.
For example, the other day, a contractor came to do some work in my house and tried to get into my network. My phone immediately identified that attempt through the app. It gives you a notification right away, which is a benefit that most others don’t offer.
October is the Cybersecurity Awareness Month. In your view, what aspect, threat or strategy used by cybercriminals is being overlooked by companies or people in general?
When thinking about cybersecurity, most people only think of how to protect their computers or touch-and-feel devices in general – laptops, iPads, smartphones. I think it’s more important to see what the world is becoming now with IoT [Internet of Things] devices. You can download antivirus and malware removers for computers and laptops, but that only protects those devices – leaving all sorts of smart home devices like TVs, washing machines, and cameras vulnerable. .
I have 45 personal IoT devices in my household: cameras, switches, printers… The average user doesn’t think about how they can be hacked through those devices. To me, that’s the most important piece of cybersecurity knowledge which people should be more aware of..
So, you need to make sure other devices besides touch-and-feel ones are safe. How does that happen? You ensure your connected devices are secured at the access point in your household where everything happens. The heartbeat of your house is going to be your router, your mesh unit, your cable modem – that’s what you need to protect your personal network.
That’s where you want everything to stop and identify right away if something is happening. You don’t want somebody to attack your house cameras and see your household or listen to everything you say, and that’s why we created the Minim software solution – to keep those IoT devices protected.
More and more professionals have been working from home since the pandemic. Besides using Minim, what can we do to boost our connectivity and Wi-Fi signal?
Most people upgraded their devices to increase their household connectivity capacities because their old networks with low-bandwidth and low processing were not enough for multiple people doing video calls and online tasks at the same time.
Newer technology and protocols like Wi-Fi 6E allows users increased bandwidth for faster processing, and our new products including the Motorola Q14 help users harness these advancements for better connectivity experiences.. You still need to work with your cable provider to get the needed speed for your demands, but the shift in technology is the decisive factor to boost connectivity.
What are Minim’s plans for the next 3 to 5 years?
I can say that I am very excited with the products we’ve launched so far. We were very happy to get a WiFi 6E product on the market in the last couple of months and see great reviews roll in on our full assortment of Motorola mesh systems. We have even more products and advancements to announce in the coming year.
On top of all this, we made our software available on our products. That’s a key we wanted to close out as our integration from Zoom and Minim: to make sure all products from cable modems to our advanced mesh systems featured software support through the motosync app.
Our roadmap for next year explores growing our software to deliver enhanced functionality besides those it delivers today. Although I cannot share details,I remain excited about the future, and how our software will simplify cybersecurity for our users.
Leave a comment