Huntress has launched in Australia and New Zealand with an eye on servicing small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) through the Managed Service Provider (MSP) channel.
Founded by former NSA cyber operators and backed by ThreatOps researchers, Huntress allows MSPs to deploy managed endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions.
With an investment in on-shore threat hunting and product support personnel, the Huntress ANZ team is led by Regional Director, Reece Appleton, formerly of Datto.
“Cybersecurity in Australia isn’t just an enterprise problem anymore. ACSC suggests 43 per cent of all cybercrime in Australia is directed towards SMBs. Malicious actors are targeting these businesses (SMBs) because they know they are under-protected and can be resistant to cybersecurity change,” Appleton comments. A lot of those SMBs are serviced by the MSP community, who despite being technological leaders, run into a number of challenges when trying to deploy and manage security solutions which have been built for the enterprise. The challenge for MSPs is that most EDRs are too noisy and costly to manage. They typically don’t have the security expertise to threat hunt and manage them effectively, let alone the time or capacity to do so. Human security analysts are critical, and outsourcing to a SOC or a MDR product is usually too costly for MSPs to scale,” Appleton says.
Huntress discovered and led the response to Kaseya’s VSA supply chain attack in 2021 and has been heavily involved in other incidents such as the supply chain exploitation of SolarWinds Orion, zero day vulnerabilities found in Microsoft Exchange, and most recently the 3CX exploit.
“Huntress is well known in the MSP community because of our involvement in high profile incidents like the Kaseya VSA and Solarwinds Orion attacks. Our founders care deeply about the MSP community, which is shared throughout the entire organisation, and can be seen in the thought leadership and support we put out into the community,” Appleton comments.
“To ensure MSPs and their customers in ANZ can access the cybersecurity expertise and support we’re known for, we’re investing heavily into local cybersecurity experts, particularly across our ThreatOps, product support and sales engineering teams.”
“Finally, we understand the local market, with decades of MSP and cybersecurity experience across the ANZ team. MSPs want a partner, not just a vendor, so we’re putting a lot of effort into cybersecurity education and partner enablement. We know partners want to educate their customers and offer solutions which align to frameworks like the Essential Eight and NIST, so we’re building the pathway there.”
With central Headquarters located in Maryland, United States, Chief Revenue Officer, Mike LaPeters comments, “Huntress is thrilled to expand our presence across the ANZ region to provide increased security and defence against attacks and threats. Reece and team are well positioned to help MSPs defend the three million plus SMBs that are the lifeblood of the economy in the region.”
