Why Minim

Minim was inspired by the DDoS attack against Dyn on October 21. 2016.  What happened that day was the largest ever botnet attacked and disabled a key piece of the Internet.  Said a different way, a few punks in a few weekends effectively disabled (temporarily) the company I built for 15 years. The technical and operations teams at Dyn and numerous other companies mobilized to quickly mitigate the event.  They should still be thanked for their effort.  For me - I'm left wanting.  This can/may happen again and the underlying problem is getting worse.

This attack was the combination of a run-of-the-mill desktop computer exploit, a clever scanning tool to propagate itself, and a CNC to coordinate itself.  It was rather efficient and spread quickly to over 600,000 confirmed devices.  Dyn reported that it saw tens of millions of unique addresses which created the biggest and most staggering attack.  This effectively ushered in the era of IoT attacks.

All of this was motivated by a Minecraft scam - a squabble turned international incident.  On a whim, a small group of people mobilized what can only be called a prank or petty revenge turned bad.  The impact they caused demonstrates the woeful nature of these IoT devices coming to the home. Consumers are simply unprotected victims in the middle.

What's crazy to me is that enterprise security and network management techniques have not migrated to the consumer networking space in the last decade.  The average home is pretty simple (few computers, some mobile phones, and a wifi printer/TV/camera).  That was just like the enterprise 20-30 years ago - a T-1 line and a few devices.  Now the enterprise has hundreds of megabytes of traffic, supports bring-your-own-devices, and employs a myriad of network techniques to run it all.  What is the homeowner to do - someone who is not a network or security administrator?  They have no clue how to manage it and if something breaks, who do they call? This is a perfect opportunity for care providers to get the right tools to meet these needs and solve some of these problems.

I founded Minim to do just that. Minim extends the management of networks to include IoT devices.  Our platform creates real-time visibility of and context for devices in the home.  We identify security vulnerabilities, malware, and DDoS - plus we fix it automatically.

Minim helps care providers earn trust and confidence supporting their customers by helping them protect, monitor and manage home networks with deep insights and context for IoT devices.