West Perth based junior explorer Drake Resources has made the popular leap from mining to technology with the acquisition of Israeli based cyber security firm Genome Technologies Ltd.
Genome Technologies has a unique proprietary technology that uses an algorithm to “profile” client company employees in order to assess their cyber security risk to the company.
It is based on the theory that an organization’s cyber security can easily be compromised by the online and other activities of its people, even if they are acting in a non-malicious way.
The algorithm assesses and profiles the activities of each employee and then applies an individual security risk threat level to each of them.
The next step in the process is for the system to then provide customized mitigation, intelligence and training solutions to reduce the risk posed by each individual employee.
According to Genome, the cyber security threat to companies has significantly widened in recent years as employees are permitted to bring their own devices to work, access vast social networks, remotely access servers from anywhere anytime, engage with the “internet of things” and wear internet connected devices whilst at work.
The company says most organizations are ill-equipped to meet the threat, still believing in out-dated defence software and outmoded strategies that are not adequate to deal with the sophisticated and well organized hacker of today who is more than capable of exploiting the “human factor” within an organization.
Drake says it will target companies with more than 500 employees around the globe and that the world wide cyber security market is set to grow from USD$77 billion in 2015 to an impressive USD$170 billion in the next 5 years alone.
Interestingly Genome says it has already received significant interest internationally with a number of Letters of Intent received from organizations in the telecommunication, accounting and insurance sectors that are interested to adopt the Genome technology.
Drake Resources non-executive Chairman Brett Fraser said:
“The cyber security market is massive and continues to grow with cyber-attacks having a major impact from financial institutions through to government departments.”
“For example, we have seen the impact of this threat recently in Western Australia with a cyber-attack on State Parliament which rendered computers and phones inoperable.”
“There is pressure on company boards and organisations generally to consider cyber-attacks in their governance review since it is emerging as a significant, growing risk becoming more difficult to contain, quantify and insure against.”
The deal appears to be a mostly script deal worth around $11m with Drake to pay the vendors 518,571,429 Drake shares after reconsolidating the capital of the company at a minimum of 2c per share.
The vendors will end up with around 45% of Drake shares post consolidation and after the company has raised around AUD$9.4m to fund its ongoing operations.
The only cash to be paid to the vendors will be a one off USD$440 000 payment as part of the deal.
Drake says it is targeting revenue within 12 to 15 months.
