ZeroPoint Earns Mega Points with DHS

The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate’s Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced that ZeroPoint, an exploit detection and analytics tool, has spun off as a startup company called ZeroPoint Dynamics.

The technology focuses on analyzing documents, email, web content and server traffic for potentially hazardous content known as exploit payloads. With the technology, users no longer need to guess whether a document is infected with malicious code and instead will be notified quickly before data is lost, S&T officials say in a press release. The key to the ZeroPoint approach, the press release states, is a patented “execution-of-data” technology that uses an advanced micro-operating system built into the analysis engine to enable fast, accurate inspections of data and memory to identify malicious code. 

ZeroPoint was developed by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and funded by the National Science Foundation. It is the eighth cybersecurity technology transitioning to commercialization as a part the S&T Transition to Practice (TTP) program.

The TTP program complements the S&T process of funding projects through the full research-and-development lifecycle and into the commercial marketplace. Each fiscal year, the TTP program selects promising cybersecurity technologies developed with federal funding to incorporate into the 36-month transition-to-market program. TTP introduces these technologies to cybersecurity professionals around the country with the goal of connecting them to investors, developers and integrators who can advance the technology and turn it into commercially viable products.