Kechuang People | Qingteng CEO Zhang Fu: Challenge the most difficult thing and pursue world-class cyber security products

Zhang Fu's heart is turbulent, hidden under a gray T-shirt, sweatpants, and white hole shoes, it is difficult to feel when he first sees it. Over the years, investors, partners, and employees have commented on him surprisingly unanimously: pursuing the ultimate network security technology, constantly trying to challenge the most difficult things in the world, and being extremely indifferent to fame and fortune.

network security, believe in

Zhang Fu was obsessed with computers in junior high school. Most of his peers used computers as game consoles, but he was enamored with typing on Basic on the 286, asking for answers from the online world.

In 2001, after being admitted to Tongji University, Zhang Fu became a well-known rookie in the white hat circle through frantically learning code and safety knowledge. He described the state at that time as looking up to the great god to hone his martial arts while working with the great god to maintain network security. "Being a white hat was my only belief at that time."

In 2005, World of Warcraft opened its public beta, Zhang Fu joined the Ninth City, and led the creation of an anti-plug-in system and the common memory of millions of Warcraft players: secret security card. As a result, Zhang Fu embarked on the road of business security struggle for nearly a decade.

In 2014, when his father died unexpectedly, Zhang Fu started a long test facing his heart: If he would die tomorrow, would he regret it for his whole life?

At that time, Zhang Fu didn't mention his high salary for the time being. The option value alone was worth tens of millions. If you count the freezing period, you only need to wait 16 months to cash out. However, such an enviable life does not satisfy Zhang Fu's expectations for life: He has always concentrated on the cutting-edge technology, and feels that if he doesn't do anything, his ideals will drift away.

The reality is full, but Zhang Fu finally decided to embrace his skinny ideals: to give up high-paying, options, and sincere offers from industry leaders and go north to start a business.

In 2021, which is frequently mentioned in internal volume, big and small weeks, and 996, looking back at Qingteng at the beginning of its business in 2014, it is difficult to understand one thing: why would someone agree to Zhang Fu's harsh conditions and choose to join Qingteng?

Zhang Fu's team first talked about three requirements: the monthly salary must not exceed 10,000, the real money must be invested, and the company must live.

Of course, together with the three major requirements, there are three extremely determined prophecies:

First, within a year, there will be countless huge mergers and acquisitions in the cyber security industry;

Second, within three years, the state will definitely pass administrative legislation to require companies to fulfill their social obligations on network security. What we do now will catch up with the trend when the product matures;

Third, within ten years, the "mainframe security product" I call will surely become the core of enterprise security.

Solve the last mile problem of safety
According to Zhang Fu's idea, the reason why Qingteng exists is to solve the problems that are difficult to solve in the industry, but are very important, and have not been solved.

What is the unsolved problem in the cyber security industry?

After working in Party A’s enterprise for many years, he is naturally well versed in the pain points of safety. Party A has adopted many security products, but mainly traffic security products and border security products. After a security incident, they can only analyze through traffic data, but because there is no host-side data, it is difficult to complete high-quality traceability analysis. The ultimate goal of hackers is the data on the host, and the core foothold is also on the business system. How to solve the problem of the last mile of safety seems to have become a bottleneck in the development of the safety industry.

"If you can install a probe on the host, it would be great to clearly provide the fine-grained data on the host side." In Zhang Fu's view, the host is the crown jewel in the protection of the entire security system, and host security is the development of the security industry. The inevitable trend.

After choosing the track, Zhang Fu led the eight brothers in the rental house in Shangdi Jiayuan, and began to write codes day and night, starting the road to entrepreneurship.

The reality is cruel and fair, and is never biased because of the purity of faith. At that time, the cognition level and construction level of the entire security industry did not match, and most Party A companies could not accept the mode of installing Agent on the mainframe. Products could not be sold and talents could not be recruited. At that time, the average length of tenure of Qingteng sales staff was only 3-6 months, and the order completion rate was even less than 1%, which was difficult.

But Zhang Fu never gave up on his insistence on the strategic direction. In the end, they waited for a head customer who also recognized that "mainframe security is the future" and started the road of rapid development.

Dream world-class products, face the most difficult things

Zhang Fu is a pure idealist.
"We hope to be able to make world-class products and make world-class contributions."

"To make a world-class security product" is the inner motivation that has supported Zhang Fu's bloody battle so far. He has a clear definition of world-class security products: to achieve global leadership in multiple functions, an extremely excellent product experience, and Very high and extremely wide market share.

10 million lines of code, 300+ version iterations, stability as high as 99.9999%. After seven years of business, Zhang Fu successfully led Qingteng to serve 1000+ large customers in the government, finance, operators, large enterprises, Internet, medical, education and other industries. , 6,000,000+ core servers provide stable and efficient security protection.

Zhang Fu, who has been deeply involved in the cyber security industry for nearly 20 years, knows how good the world’s leading security products are. “The greater the product, the simpler the road and the simpler, the more profound insights and concepts are needed. The ultimate abstraction is the goal that Qingteng has been pursuing."

The seemingly unreachable goal, with the efforts of the Qingteng team taking the life of Carry, spelled out a glimmer of light. For example, in 2020, the Qingteng Thunder Fire Engine Webshell detection platform will be publicly tested, detonating the security industry.

Because of its simple coding, convenient use, and ever-changing, Webshell has become one of the most commonly used attack methods by hackers. In 2019 alone, there were over a million cases of virus and Trojan horse infections in enterprise user servers across the country, of which WebShell malware infections accounted for 73.27%.

For such a common attack method, network security companies willing to invest heavily and determined to declare war on WebShell are very rare, because purely based on business logic judgments, this field does not do well or not, and there is no big difference in revenue contribution, especially The customer side also generally thinks that this stubborn illness is difficult to solve, and there is no particularly high requirement for it.

Do it or not? Zhang Fu is not sure whether he can succeed, but he knows what he wants: "I want to solve those difficult and important problems." So, this time he was dubbed by the insiders as "eating the gall of a leopard." "The Thunderfire Engine Webshell is publicly tested."

The final test result quoted the original text of Liu Baoxu, Director of the Sixth Research Office of the Institute of Information Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Director of the Beijing Key Laboratory of Network Security Protection Technology: "The Thunderfire engine not only achieved a breakthrough in Webshell detection rate of 99.54%, but also broke the security products. I dare not accept the challenge of the open beta. Although there are always voices in the industry announcing that its Webshell detection rate can reach 99%, this statement is based on the static detection results of Webshell samples published on the Internet. Once the samples are processed by hackers, they can be bypassed. The detection rate will drop suddenly. Actual combat is the only criterion for testing product capabilities, and I have to applaud Qingteng."

Cruel status quo and bright future

Technologist: There is vicious competition in the security industry that integrates open source code and low-price bidding. It is not uncommon for bad money to drive out good money. How does Qingteng deal with this situation?
Zhang Fu: This phenomenon has always existed. Just recently we encountered a similar incident. For a project with a budget of 300,000 yuan, competitors used open source software to bid for 10,000 yuan. This situation does have a great impact on us. In the bidding stage, he has the menus you have, and he claims that you have the functions. The real gap can only be fully manifested in the use stage.

Technologist: Can this problem be solved by optimizing POC capabilities?
Zhang Fu: Customers who are serious about POC will definitely see the difference, but the current situation is that most customers still adopt the principle of low price winning, and the price is close to compare the technology and performance, but the price gap is too big, and the technology is 100 times better. significance. This phenomenon is widespread, making it difficult for China's cyber security industry to have real technological innovators. Once someone proves that something works, they will follow suit and plagiarize, and disrupt the market with extremely low prices.

Technologist: To C's strategy of grabbing the market at low prices or even free of charge is considered to be unworkable in the To B field, but are you sure you can give it a try?
Zhang Fu: The security industry has its own particularities. It is impossible to judge the pros and cons of the strategy regardless of the actual situation. This industry needs to encourage more innovators to stand on the commanding heights of the market.

Technologist: How do you judge the technological development of the security industry in the next ten years?
Zhang Fu: First, as customers' understanding of security continues to improve, the future of the cyber security industry must belong to innovative product companies. I believe that the future where product-based companies lead the market and innovators continue to emerge is not far away.
Second, I am personally very optimistic about the combination of the SaaS model and network security products. Nowadays, the main paying customers in the security industry are still large customers. Their requirements for data security are generally very high, and the SaaS model has not been developed for the time being. But in the end, network security services must benefit the public, and the SaaS model will become the main service form sooner or later.
Third, in the future, products and services will be combined.

Kechuang: So what is Qingteng's product direction in the future?
Zhang Fu: Qingteng's efforts have always followed a principle: we are to do things that are difficult and important, but no one wants to do. Because of the difficulties, other people walked around, leading to the seemingly low value of these things from the business logic. But the real value is not measurable with money.
Some friends have persuaded me that it is easy to fail in this way, but isn't it a life-threatening death to start a business? Valuable things are not done because of difficulties. What is the purpose of starting a business? Is it just for money? It's easy to live for money. The company has a budget every year. I pack some new concepts every year and eat it, but Qingteng doesn't want to live like this. We have our own persistence.
The characteristic of Qingteng is to smash hard and hard things.