14 DAY TRIAL // Norse Corp, a California-based cybersecurity firm, almost disappeared over the past weekend after the company's CEO was forced to resign last week, as Brian Krebs reports.
Mr. Krebs says that Norse Corp, which launched in 2011, grew into one of the most well-known security firms around, after a few investments from multiple capital firms - a fleet of shell companies created by the company's founders - and thanks to the famous Norse real-time attack map, which got a lot of media coverage.
As Mr. Krebs discovered, last week, the company's board of directors asked Norse CEO, Sam Glines, to step down from his position.
The board of directors also informed employees that they could show up to work starting Monday, but they couldn't guarantee they would get paid for their work. Just weeks before, Norse also laid off around 30% of its staff.
At the same time, the company's website was taken offline, and its famous real-time cyber-attack map that works based on eight million sensors embedded in servers installed in 47 countries stopped showing any information.
It all stems from a fake Norse Corp report from 2015
Mr. Krebs tried to explain the outcome of current events by presenting a timeline of the company's early life that included many reverse mergers, fake security threat reports, and a collection of shell corporations operating in countries in which the US has forbidden them.
Dragos Security CEO, Robert M. Lee, also provided his thoughts about the company's demise, having been one of the main security analysts that brought to light the fact that Norse Corp was faking its security reports.
Back in April 2015, Mr. Lee helped shed some light on how Norse Corp was reading data collected via honeypot servers and was presenting it as data acquired from real-life attacks. Some of this fake data was included in a report that attributed attacks on US ICS/SCADA systems to Iranian hackers.
With their website offline, no official news has come out of the company since Mr. Krebs published his investigation.