For several years now,  smart phones have increased in popularity and will continue to do so for years to come. We are truly only in the beginning of this development and can expect to see even faster and better systems in the future.

One thing that is however still lacking is effective handling of mobile security for a company with more than a few employees. Most available solutions are monolithic solutions where a company buys a software suite with some number of features (anti-virus, anti-spam, locking mechanism etc.) and then has to manually install this suite onto every single employee’s phone one by one, and subsequently if any additions are made to the software later on, in most cases you’d have to do the same manual reinstall all over again. In the end this can lead to enormous financial costs for a company, simply in shear terms of man-hours used!

Hoodgate is adopting another solution to the problem! Hoodgate will be offering a service where you, as a customer, can handle all your employee’s phones through a central control panel. Through this control panel you can then create a “Mobile Security Policy” for your company.

A “Mobile Security Policy” is basically the features you want to have, e.g. the ability to find a given phone through GPS, encrypted e-mails, remote lock of the phone (in case of theft), voice logging, and much more. Once you have a customer profile you can easily buy new features, remove old or order specially developed ones, and all these changes to your “Mobile Security Policy” are automatically sent to all your employee’s phones, ultimately making management of security for your mobile workforce much easier and cheaper. It is then the Hoodgate software on these phones that take in updates and synchronizes with the company “Mobile Security Policy” stored with Hoodgate online, rather than your system administrators having to do it manually.

Hoodgate is just starting up now, and does not at the moment have a finished product. We will however be making regular updates on how the development is going, and try to continually involve future customers in the development, in order to make as good a product as humanly possible.

The platforms we intend to support are the following:

With development prioritizes more or less in that order, so that the primary platform is Android.

All the plans above are of course still preliminary and open for change, and you can easily have a say in those changes and speak your mind to us. All you have to do is comment on this blog post, contact us directly or on one of the social networks we’re on (links are farther down). We’re very curious to hear what you think, even if you’re the type of guy/girl who loves to point out flaws in plans or designs – a real hacker type person! Feel free to contact us and point out what we’ve done wrong or haven’t thought about. In the end your opinions might very well result in an even better final product.

The company website can be found at http://www.hoodgate.com/ although it’s still very preliminary. As we state several times on the page: We’d rather use our time developing the software you need rather than worry about website details at the moment. The short comings on the site will however be handled within the near future.

You can also find us at other places on the web. We invite you to get involved and get your voice heard. We’re listening!:

We’ve now come to the point where we’ve decided to stop featuring the “Did you know?” tweets and instead begin twittering about subjects like the following:

• Security related news from around the world
• Public discussions we have an opinion about
• Research news from the fields of information security, cryptography and IT criminal psychology
• Security & business related comments from Aconiac Security Group members
• Tutorials & Guides which we believe our readers will find especially useful

Also unlike before, we will not be focused on putting out tweets once a day (or at any other specific time), but instead when they are relevant. This may mean that some days won’t even have any tweets at all, while other days may have several.

We hope our Twitter followers will keep on enjoying our feed, even though we’re now shifting focus! Feel free to comment on our actions here or on Twitter.. we want to hear what you think!

Best Regards

Aconiac Security Group

From here we will keep on doing our work, but more importantly we will be creating a new sister company focused on developing security solutions for the mobile worker. While employees working from home was one of the big threats to a company’s security infrastructure a few years ago, now and in the future we will see that mobile employees are much more at risk of being used as entrances to the company’s infrastructure. For example by hackers hacking into (or stealing) laptops, cell phones, PDA’s etc. Most of these mobile workstations still lack crucial security and many companies are running huge risks each and every day – we hope to change that sometime in the near future. But until then, feel free to contact us concerning your company’s security policies on mobile employees.

In conclusion, here’s a few pictures from our new offices:

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