Our latest advancements are 100% under the hood and make the same FixMeStick work on many different types of PCs, with optimization for Windows XP, Vista, 7 , 8 and 8.1. Together it made for a really challenging (and interesting) upgrade, but we’ve got something novel as a result. Please let us know what you think!
Read more to see what we’ve achieved with our upgrade:…
Removing computer viruses ranges between painfully frustrating and impossible. Twelve months ago we launched the first ever consumer-ready USB device for removing viruses from infected PCs. Today, we launched a free upgrade that makes the FixMeStick the first virus removal device to support Windows 8 PCs.
PC manufacturers must include a technology called Secure Boot on PCs that ship with Windows 8. Secure Boot uses a public-key infrastructure to verify the integrity of the operating system and prevent unauthorized programs booting on the device.
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We’ve now been in market for exactly one year, and we would like to thank our customers and our parters (especially Kaspersky Labs, Sophos, and VIPRE) and share a few of our milestones:
15K FixMeSticks purchased by customers in 18 countries.
Major retail distribution agreements in Canada and the USA.
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Ben Affleck produces outstanding heist movies: Gone Baby Gone, The Town, Argo (well, it’s a type of a heist…). We’re unlikely to ever see an online heist movie out of Affleck though. The same three factors that make Internet security so difficult are what make it so unexciting.
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The principles underlying the FixMeStick are tried and true, and are no surprise to anyone in Internet security. The engineering challenge is to get the principles to work on a mass scale for non-technical consumers. What we’ve done with the FixMeStick is implemented these principles (separate clean device, multiple scanners, no dependency on untrusted code) on a consumer device that anyone can use.
We tend to get one of two responses from security and IT Pros that learn about the FixMeStick:
1 – I can build that myself for free using an ISO from an anti-virus company.
2 – I love it, a solution I can send to my friends and family that won’t come back on me.
The security guys are The Hacker News are in camp #2: The FixMeStick : My Parents Need This
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The following is an interview that Corey and Marty, co-founders of the FixMeStick, conducted as part of the International Startup Festival, hosted in Montreal.
How did you guys come up with the FixMeStick?
We’ve spent our careers in Internet endpoint security, and at our last company we saw every day how malware was consistently beating anti-malware and how it leaves people stranded.
So we heeded the call and lit out to build the FixMeStick. The principles underlying the FixMeStick are tried and true, and are no surprise to anyone in Internet security. The engineering challenge was how to get the principles to work on a mass scale for non-technical consumers.
Early in the first year of our startup journey, we became somewhat disenchanted with the FixMeStick, and tabled the concept for several weeks. We were concerned that as an investment we were too far afield of what was popular (mobile, social, cloud) within the startup and venture-capital community.
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In January 2012, Microsoft confirmed it would require hardware manufacturers to enable Secure Boot on Certified Windows 8 devices, and that x86/64 devices must provide the option to turn it off while ARM based devices must not provide the option to turn it off. Soon after the feature was announced, it caused widespread fear it…
We’ve spent our careers in Internet endpoint security, and at our last company we saw every day how malware was consistently beating anti-malware and how stranded that leaves people.
So we heeded the call and lit out to build the FixMeStick. The principles underlying the FixMeStick are tried and true, and are no surprise to anyone in Internet security. The engineering challenge would be to get the principles to work on a mass scale for non-technical consumers.
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It takes a village to boot a startup, especially, one with no external funding. Here are the smart and generous people we’re fortunate to have in our village (unordered etc.): Chad Loeven: The connector’s connector. Chad’s connected us to so many great anti-virus people, and for nothing but karma in return. You can see Chad in…