Follow the money

How to make money running a clearinghouse, and why the business model is the trust model. The Athena partner program is free. Here's what that means. Athena pools pre-disclosure vulnerability findings — the things models are surfacing in open source before anyone else knows they exist. Some of the organizations best positioned to act on that information don't ship software at all. They run the networks. We have partners that sit in the infrastructure and network path, able to block exploitation of a vulnerability before disclosure ever happens — no patch required, no action from anyone downstream. We hand them findings with just enough time to act on them. To us, giving that away makes perfect sense. It surprises almost everyone we talk to. One of these partners kept asking me the same question while we were onboarding them: "You understand we're going to charge our customers extra for this, right? And you don't care?" He asked three times. I said yes three times. I think he thought I'd misheard. I hadn't. That advance notice is the most monetizable information in the security industry. It's also the most useful for the world. We're giving it to them for nothing, they're…