Finite State
Matt Wyckhouse is the CEO of Finite State.
The PUF team reached out to respected experts helping FERC-jurisdictional companies identify and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities, particularly those in which key components of the grid could come under cyber-attack. Matt Wyckhouse of Finite State and Tobias Whitney of Fortress Information Security explained for us what to worry about, what not to worry about, and how all of us can pitch in to help ensure our grid is cyber-secured.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: What is your role with the company? Also, that's a cool business name.
Matt Wyckhouse: We love the name, too. It comes from a computer science term, a finite state machine, which is the mathematical representation of a computer. Back when Alan Turing was working on the first computers, he formalized those mathematical models. We're a bunch of deep cybersecurity and software engineers that are taking on hard problems. The name reflects that well.
We started off focused on this new area for cybersecurity, which is newer in some enterprises and not so new for utilities, where you have all of these embedded systems that we're going to broadly call, internet of things devices. That is not a traditional PC, server, or mobile device, but it's on-network, and it's doing something important, generally more important than what a single PC is doing.