Meet a 17 Year-Old Business Tycoon

Ft. Myers, Florida June 16, 1998: Mark Rosen, President of Mach5 Software, Inc. is not your average teenager. A recent graduate from high school, Rosen, at the age of 17, has developed, marketed, and released a line of commercially successful data encryption and security software. His flagship product, Kremlin, runs on Windows PCs, features military strength encryption and includes powerful and innovative new security features not contained in other commercial encryption products such as MacAfee PCCrypto or RSA SecurePC.

Rosen began selling computer software at the age of 13, but with much less success. "I think I made $5 on my first computer program," Rosen says, "it wasn’t very popular". In May of 1997, Rosen, then a junior in high school, founded Mach5 Software with $300 from his savings account. He has managed to turn Mach5 Software into a commercially viable business that stands to pay for college. The road to success has required a combination of software programming skill and business acumen; "By using the Internet as a distribution medium and utilizing the full power of electronic commerce, I can keep my overhead at a minimum. My business is completely electronic." Mach5 Software has begun to expand, and is beginning to advertise on popular Internet software sites.

Rosen currently employs two people, one a professional programmer who began working as a programmer before Rosen was even born, and the other a sophomore at his old high school.

Mach5 Software’s flagship product, Kremlin, utilizes 160 bit encryption, encryption so powerful the US government will not permit it to be exported. "Just to give you an idea of how powerful Kremlin is, if 1 billion computers were each searching through 1 billion possible passwords per second, it would still take over 10,000,000,000,000 years to break data encrypted with Kremlin." Yet the powerful encryption in Kremlin is not the truly innovative part, as Rosen explains, "Windows was not designed for security. Even if I delete a document, say, my secret plans for a hostile corporate takeover, the document actually remains, unencrypted, on the computer’s disk drive, where any hacker who knows what he’s doing can recover it." Kremlin’s data-shredding technology ensures that "deleted" documents are truly deleted from the hard drive, and its other Windows security features combined to "turn your PC into an impenetrable fortress through which no hacker can break."

‘Mach5 Software, Inc. was founded in May 1997 by Mark Rosen, then a 16 year old junior in high school at the Community School of Naples. Rosen graduated the valedictorian of his class and will attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall. Mach5 Software has since established a strong foothold in the security software market with its popular Kremlin security suite. For more information on Mach5 Software or any of Mach5 Software’s products, visit the Mach5 Software web site at http://www.mach5.com/’

ADDENDUM: Kremlin is no longer sold under the name Mach5. For information about Kremlin, please visit http://kremlinencrypt.com/
 

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