How Secure Channels Attempted to Intimidate a Critic and Failed Spectacularly

Ms. Murphy's bio page describes her as a "guerilla marketing expert", and perhaps that is what this is. If leveling ridiculous accusations at your critics using obviously fake Twitter accounts is "guerilla marketing" than perhaps I should look into it, because it sounds fun, and I've always wanted to have a Director level title.

tl;dr - Dee Murphy, Director of Marketing for Secure Channels, created an anonymous twitter account in order to sling mud at at a prominent Secure Channels critic. However, one of Ms. Murphy's tweets from the anonymous account was composed of a screenshot showing her original twitter profile and a browser tab titled "How to take a screenshot on your Mac".

That screenshot was so outstandingly bad I almost want to believe that someone elaborately staged the screenshot to make a Secure Channel exec look incompetent... but Occam's Razor prevails.

This should really serve as a lesson for startups on how not get your name out there.

In an industry (infosec) that's built on reputation and experience, you can't just go into it and start running your company like the "Price is Right" and offer all kinds of gimmicks to get people to buy into your product.

The way you win is to humbly hand over your source code to the community, have them pen test it and then graciously accept any advice or flaws they point out. Then work tirelessly to make it better and prove you take the people and the other companies in your space seriously.

Infosec is no joke either and you shouldn't treat the people in the industry like a bunch of idiots. This is a prefect example of a lifelong sales guy, using worn out sales pitches to try and sell his product like an infomercial.

I appreciated the comment on TFA from their former lobbyist. Those creatures rarely crawl out from under cover, but apparently this one is really pissed about not getting paid. I want to give NIST the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume that the "deal" he cites was actually just, "we'll call you, sometime, we promise!"

I almost feel bad for Murphy. This is super embarrassing "icing on the cake" of a situation that shows incompetence in not just technical ability, which I would think could be expected from an executive at such a technically focused startup, but marketing itself- which I would imagine is supposed to be her expertise.

"Unbreakable" worked for Oracle Corp, so why not "Secure Channels?" ;-)

Omfg. That Android code sending the email using their gmail account was unbelievable. I'd hate to think "real" security companies have cruft this bad, but...

Could a mod get rid of the #wsa-endnote-1 at the end of the URL?

It's funny how the Titanic was deemed unsinkable. Every time someone calls their shiney new think 'Un'-something, nature seems to conspire against them :)