Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective had the privilege of interviewing Zebastian Victorin, CEO and Co-Owner of AxCrypt. She found out about his company’s revolutionary file encryption software.
Safety Detectives: What was your journey to cybersecurity?
Zebastian Victorin: AxCrypt was originally created to serve a personal need, back in 2001. There weren’t really any existing data security solutions yet that were both simple and easy to use. The initial author had a need to share confidential data online, and that’s when AxCrypt started. The first version was developed in 2001.
During the 13 years that AxCrypt has been on the market, it had grown to be one of the world’s most popular encryption software. To further improve the solution and take AxCrypt to the next level, the author teamed up with co-founder Zebastian Victorin to commercialize the product. The new version of AxCrypt was released in 2016, and since then many updates followed.
These many years of experience have taught us how great the need is for a strong solution that is easy to use. It shows in the awards we’ve received, and it the global reach we have. We’re passionate to keep improving AxCrypt and making data security solutions simple and reliable for everyone.
SD: What is AxCrypt’s flagship software?
ZV: File encryption! Our vision: security, reliability, and simplicity. Everything we make is done with these as the highest priority. Our file encryption software is available for free, and we add another layer of features in AxCrypt Premium and Business. This includes a password manager and key sharing.
SD: What industries use your solutions?
ZV: We have many private individuals that use AxCrypt. As for businesses, we see mainly financial services, governmental institutions (administration, education, health care), and IT companies.
SD: What is the worst cyberthreat today?
ZV: Ransomware has seen a huge increase over the last few years, probably in part due to companies getting better at securing their data. The problem is that in ransomware attacks, keeping your data encrypted is not enough. It’s more important than ever to make sure you have recent backups of all of your important data, and that these backups are stored in separate locations, so an attacker can never get to both your live data and backups.
SD: How is the cybersecurity landscape going to change over the next few years?
ZV: More and more of our society is connected, but it will be even more so in the future. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been a topic for the last decade, but it has yet to really make an impact. When this impact comes, it means every household will have numerous connected devices, some of which you might not even realize is connected and hence very poorly protected. More poorly protected devices mean more attack vectors which can be used for a whole multitude of malicious intents.