Cybersecurity startup extends intelligence, from small biz to college (and wartime Ukraine)

A cyber attack at a Kansas City area college pushed serial entrepreneur Conner Hazelrigg and her on-campus colleague — a decorated CIA intelligence officer-turned-cybersecurity professional — into action, the founders of Hilltop Technologies said.

“When we started really looking into it, we realized how vulnerable higher education is and how soft of targets they are,” said Hazelrigg, assistant vice president of strategic innovation at William Jewell College, managing director of Mathes Innovation Center, and founder of 1773 Innovation Co.

“This threat permeates — not just higher ed — but not-for-profits, municipalities, small governments, really, anybody who doesn’t necessarily have the immediate funds to allocate or prioritize their own startup security,” she said. “But yet, we all have devices.”

Hilltop Technologies’ co-founders are now on a mission to bring cybersecurity innovation to those organizations traditionally left behind like universities, non-profits, and small businesses, Hazelrigg shared. 

Through it all, they’re partnering with William Jewell to train the next generation of cybersecurity professionals, Hazelrigg added.

“So much venture capital and funding went into cybersecurity probably a decade ago and has built some of these mega giants,” she explained. “They’re able to tackle those large enterprise accounts. They’re able to get the big Fortune 500 companies. We are doing this with so much more thought in terms of how we can protect the soft targets.”

The Hilltop team includes Hazelrigg and co-founder Nick Gicinto — chief information security officer at William Jewell and  veteran of the CIA, Tesla, and Uber as an insider threat, intelligence, and security specialist — as well as one of Gicinto’s former coworkers at Tesla and Uber. (His name remains confidential due to his involvement in other projects, they said.)

Hilltop — launched in early 2024 — developed proprietary technology for endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR) capabilities, the co-founders said. 

“If you know anything about me, I’ve always been mission driven,” explained Hazelrigg, who invented a solar-paneled electric charging station to overcome challenges found in developing nations. “If you know anything about Nick, he gave his life to the government to serve this country, to protect us. You don’t get more mission driven than that.”

“So what we want to do is help the people who feel like they don’t have help,” she added, “whether that’s for profit, not-for-profit, we want to be those people’s partners.”

To keep costs affordable for these organizations, Hilltop Technologies is partnering with William Jewell — as well as SET University in Ukraine — to provide training to student interns.

“We help train their students on security analyst jobs, working behind the scenes to investigate, mitigate, and kill some of these malware type threats that exist on all of our computers,” Hazelrigg said. “We still have the highest level of expertise and trained individuals overseeing them, but a lot of cybersecurity jobs are relatively entry level. So we’re providing the student interns more education for their cyber degree programs and then also work experience.”

“By integrating our cutting-edge technologies with the academic strengths of these institutions, we are equipping students with the advanced tools and practical experience they need to be on the front lines of global cybersecurity,” Gicinto added in a news release.

William Jewell just launched a cybersecurity degree program, she continued, so now is the perfect time to start training the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Plus, if a student gets their degree from William Jewell and works for Hilltop all four years, they will be eligible to sit for their Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) certification, which requires five years of work experience. The degree program counts as a year on top of the four years of experience with Hilltop, she explained.

“They’ll be five years ahead of anybody else that they find in the talent pool,” Hazelrigg added. “So I believe we’re the only school-corporate partnership that is offering that level of opportunity for students that we can find.”

As alumni and employees of William Jewell, Hazelrigg said she and Gicinto believe it’s important to increase opportunities for students.

“William Jewell College is one of the biggest reasons for who I am today,” she explained. “So to be able to have that opportunity to give back to students is why I’m here, and it’s also to help them have opportunities I didn’t have. Nick feels the same way.”

Liberty and beyond

Hilltop’s partnership with SET University in Ukraine developed thanks to Gicinto’s role there as an adjunct professor in the cybersecurity master’s program.

“We can’t ask people to work 24/7 here,” Hazelrigg noted. “So actually having a sister school and a sister company in Ukraine that we partner with, that allows us to have that 24/7 hour security operations.”

“This collaboration creates a powerful synergy by combining Hilltop Technologies’ deep cybersecurity expertise with Ukraine’s wartime-tested experience in countering large-scale cyber attacks,” added Iryna Volnytska, president of SET University, in a news release. “It strengthens our global security efforts while providing university students with valuable hands-on experience.”

The co-founders plan to launch the program in September in Ukraine, she continued, where they have already helped to create six jobs for programmers and developers.

“We are actually going to be the first U.S. tech company to enter Ukraine since the war started,” she added. “We’re very closely tied to Ukraine and want to see the best for them. We know if our product is tried and true over there, it’ll be tried and true here, because Ukraine is such a Petri dish for bad actors to test things on.”

But they don’t just see this program benefiting students at these two universities, Hazelrigg shared. 

“What we’re doing here at Jewell is a really great example of what we want to recreate with other schools, if they see fit,” she said, noting that they also cyber summer camps for high school students.