AVTECH Has Had A Busy Week In The News!

Well! This has certainly been a busy week for us here at AVTECH Software when it comes to mentions in the news, online, and in social media.

You may not be aware of this, but there is another company called AVTECH that is based in Taiwan. They originally were named “Audio and Visual Technologies” before shortening that to AVTECH a few years ago, which sometimes causes confusion in the marketplace. They manufacture Internet-enabled CCTV cameras and DVR equipment.

Both companies make hardware designed to monitor facilities and operate in the Internet of Things (IoT) sphere, so you can imagine the consumer confusion that can sometimes occur. Our support and sales teams tend to get mistaken inquiries once or twice a week from companies looking to buy CCTV cameras or to get support on DVR equipment that don’t relate to our business.

Earlier this week a public announcement was made by a security company in Europe that detailed numerous security flaws contained in the Taiwan-based AVTECH’s hardware and software that affected over 100,000 CCTV and DVR devices. This specific firm had been notifying the manufacturer for years of their vulnerabilities, and after not receiving a response or seeing updates in their firmware, decided to make their findings public.

As you can imagine, news of an exploit that large quickly spread, leading to articles from some major outlets that cover security. Our Twitter feed one morning was so full of tweets about those stories that we couldn’t even refresh the page. Shortly after that, inquiries starting coming into our support team asking about potential exploits or vulnerabilities in AVTECH’s products.

We quickly moved to put a statement online to reassure our customers that the AVTECH in question was NOT the same AVTECH that provides Room Alert, GoToMyDevices, and Device ManageR. Once we read a few of the articles on the subject, we noticed that there was some general language included in them that some readers may have assumed referred to Room Alert and our software.

Thankfully, after reaching out to the reporters who covered the story, many of them recognized the issue and quickly moved to write addendums to better clarify that we had no relation whatsoever to the Taiwan-based AVTECH.

In particular, we’d like to thank both SecurityWeek and Sophos for being very diligent when we contacted them about the potential confusion we were seeing from our clients and vendors. Both publications clarified the difference between the two AVTECH firms in their articles, and it is much appreciated. Just last night, Kim Komando’s site published an article on the issue, and thankfully they noted the differences between the two companies right away.

All AVTECH hardware, firmware, and software undergo a rigorous testing and quality assurance process at our main offices here in Rhode Island before they are released. Since our devices are designed to work with the Internet and the cloud, we’re well aware of the safeguards needed to protect our users. We’re encouraged to know that Room Alert is trusted to help monitor facilities in over 180 countries by 80% of the Fortune 1000, federal, state and local government agencies like the FBI, Pentagon, United Nations and all four branches of the US military, which reinforces the safety and security of our products. All of our products are designed, manufactured and supported in the U.S.A.

While it was nice to see the name AVTECH all over the news and social media, let’s hope that next time it’s our AVTECH and it’s good news!

Note: The former GoToMyDevices online monitoring and management platform was migrated into RoomAlert.com in December 2017. For more information, please see our announcement article and FAQ.