Null – Filling up the Indian Cyber Security Space

Entrepreneurs are known to tap unexplored areas abound with opportunities in an economy. And for Antriksh Shah, one of the co-founders of Null, cyber security was a field that appealed to him since his engineering days. Null is an open source security community, Antriksh shares the concept, “Null is an open source community where we hold monthly meets to discuss cyber security and allied fields. We have seven chapters in cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune etc. with 2,800 registered members.” They have participation from government officers as well as geeks from the corporate side and colleges. The community meets to discuss latest ills in the cyber field and to find a solution to the problem. The conference witnesses a lot of deliberations in the field of Cyber Security and contemporary threats.

Started in 2010, Payatu technologies have organised NullCon, an international security conference recognised duly by the Government of Goa where they had the Chief Minister of Goa, Manohar Parikkar inaugurating the fifth version of conference. Delighted about the participation and response, “The conference saw a crowd of 300 odd experts with speakers from Portugal, France, Spain, Germany and Japan. We have had people who had come all the way from Europe and USA just participating in the conference,” shares Antriksh. The conference is a confluence of recruiters, technical events like Jail Break, house arrest, networking, exhibition of products and lectures by experts in this field. This year’s conference also had high profile recruiters like Adobe and HSBC participate.

Antriksh is a post graduate in the field of computer engineering from Symbiosis and the founder of Payatu Technologies, a company involved in making cyber security products as well as providing services for the same. He has worked with Cyber Crime Cell of Pune to develop a deeper understanding of the requirements in this field and wants to develop a product, which can be used for all the common cyber threats, instead of spending on customisation. The co-founders of Null are Aseem Jakhar, a senior security professional and Murtuja Bharmal, an information security practitioner who been awarded by ISC²(International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium), a highly regarded global body in the field of Information Security.

The Null conference and community comprises of some of the brightest stars like Amol Naik from Pune, one of the core members the Null community who won the Facebook BugBounty event in 2012 and Justin Searle, owner of Meeasecurity, who works on intrusion testing in the grid power plant. He exclusively performs intrusion testing for the power plants in India and USA.

The conference was also the hotbed of some very interesting ideas. “Aseem showed that malware can be injected into the Linux OS – a notion once thought impossible.” At the conference, they also had a project named Keeda which helped find out the vulnerability in Cisco networking as well as exposed the flaw in cellular operator Idea’s network system. “A lot of hacking problems were fixed because of the interactions held at conference and community talks,” says Antriksh.

Antriksh shares the vision, “India is in the infant stage in the field of Cyber security though we are fast catching up the billion dollars plus market. We discuss problems for the product manufactured abroad. I want the other way around with people all over the world discussing the products indigenously manufactured in India.”