Mark McDougal has been a hacker his whole life. He'll tell you himself, half joking, that he was raised by criminals. These days he's put that instinct to better use. Red Garrison LLC, the cybersecurity company he runs with business partner Jeremy Cunningham, gets paid to break into networks so nobody else can. It's called penetration testing, and there's almost nobody else doing it in the state outside a couple of shops in Northwest Arkansas and one guy in Little Rock. Saline County has its own now.
Mark didn't start out in tech. He earned an art degree, and he'll argue that's exactly why he's good at this job. An art degree teaches you not to be afraid to create and to notice the things most people walk right past, a security camera nobody else clocks, a pattern in how a business operates that gives away more than it should. That eye for detail turned out to translate better into cybersecurity than most computer science programs do.
Ask Mark where the name came from and he'll walk you through it. In cybersecurity, a "red team" is the offense, the side hired to attack a system on purpose and find its weak points before a real criminal does. A "garrison" is a castle's most highly trained soldiers, the last line of defense before the king or queen. Put them together and you've got the idea. When a business signs on with Red Garrison LLC, they're joining the garrison, and Mark's team is there to help them fight off whoever comes next.
Red Garrison LLC's roots run deep in education. Mark has more than 20 years around schools, and one of the company's clients is one of the largest school districts in the state. Down the road, they also protect a Benton business running just five computers. In between, the client list stretches from oil and gas companies to one of Arkansas's largest IT providers, who hires Red Garrison LLC to handle their own cybersecurity. The company is only about a year old, started as a side project that quickly became the main one. Mark and two teammates run it now, though Mark still keeps a day job while Red Garrison LLC grows into full time.
Most people who call Red Garrison LLC are scared, and some are calling after the damage is already done. Mark's approach is to walk in with humility, break down what happened in plain language, and skip the tech-guy superiority act entirely. Red Garrison LLC doesn't do quick, one-and-done engagements either. They build year-long relationships with clients, which means when a nasty vulnerability turns up in a plugin a client happens to use, Mark's usually already read about it that morning and is on the phone before it becomes a real problem.
Red Garrison LLC is home-based, working with clients on-site or remotely across Saline County and throughout Arkansas.
