Greg Reber can tell you that maintaining information security is no walk in the park.
Reber is the CEO and president of AsTech Consulting, an information security firm catering mainly to large clients in the financial services industry. He’s on a mission to ensure that sensitive Web-based information is well-defended against breaches and bad guys—and these days, there are a lot of bad guys out there.

Take last December, when the loosely organized group of hackers referring to itself as Anonymous gained illegal access to data from the security think tank Stratfor, which had clients ranging from Apple, Inc. to the U. S. Air Force. The hackers found and leaked credit card numbers, addresses and financial records. 

Breaches like these can be hard to predict and prevent. “The threat environment changes all the time,” explained Reber. “We stay on top of that, and we can make those rubber-meets-the-road defensive recommendations for our clients.”

He started AsTech in 1997, and since then has been devoted to maintaining a top-notch team. “We’ve hired the right people,” he said. “We really seem to attract an elite crowd. The level of talent and experience we bring to bear is very high, and it’s hard to find people who do what we do.”

AsTech’s main focus is online applications for banking and stock trading, as well as Web-based systems for other business-to-business and business-to-consumer services. They assess application source code for security vulnerabilities and examine deployment architecture, and they always find ways for their clients to conduct business more securely.  In the strictly regulated financial services industry, their job can get pretty complicated.

But AsTech has it covered—their employees are encouraged to learn as much as they can in order to keep up in a rapidly evolving field. “We’ve always fostered innovation and improvisation,” said Reber. “We ask our people, ‘What’s over the horizon in our field?’ We’ve established ourselves as the kind of company where you can make a difference if you come up with a better way to do things, or if you want to dive deeper, technically, than the competitors.”


For more information, pleases visit: www.astechconsulting.com