How much is it worth to know that a new vulnerability has been found in your organization’s favorite application or operating system? Would you pay $50,000.00 a year for alerts to new exploits or attacker trends? Does knowing that these issues exist give your organization a measurable heads up to prevent damages that you don’t have from your regular scanning and assessments? Would that knowledge actually spark action that reduced your risks?

Many other security firms are hoping you say “Yes!” to the above. And, with prices for those alerting mechanisms ranging from that 50K to nearly 200K per year, you had better be pretty sure of the value of those alerts.

At MSI, we believe that such knowledge is valuable. We believe that properly acted upon, such data could help many organizations prepare for security issues, tune their protective postures and increase vigilance around possible weaknesses. However, we just don’t believe that most organizations are willing to spend that 50K per year for such insights, nor do we believe they should. For several years now, we have offerred such a service, called WatchDog for FREE. That’s right, FREE per year.

Our organization does this to give back to the community. We do this because we already have to do the major work anyway to stay current and serve our clients at the level of excellence we are committed to, so why not aggregate that knowledge and give back to the world?

If you are not a WatchDog user yet, or you are considering how you might integrate an intelligence product into your security posture, feel free to give us a try. You can download the product here.

Oh, and if you like it, or the data we provide, please feel free to donate $50,000 or more to your favorite charity. They will thank you and the world will be a better place, just as it should be.