Cybersecurity stock WhiteHawk surges after US government contract win

Whitehawk (ASX:WHK) jumped as much as 65 per cent this morning after revealing it had won a five-year US government contract.

The company has been contracted a US federal government Chief Information Security Officer to implement its cyber risk monitoring software Cyber Risk Radar.

The Radar is based on externally available data and does not require access to internal IT assets and configurations to work for them.

Whitehawk says the contract will deliver it base revenues of $US580,000 ($808,000) and up to an additional $US600,000 yearly.

It comes after a successful implementation early in 2019 across 10 vendors for the same US government agency.

Prime contractor milestone

While Whitehawk has won US government contracts before, this contract is the first where it is the “prime contractor” and CEO Terry Roberts said this took the company to the next level.

“The big deal for us is that we are the prime contractor. This is a direct contract with us. It’s not through another contractor,” she told Stockhead.

Another important aspect Roberts noted was that it was focused on vendor risk — the risk of cyber crime resulting due to third party service providers.

“Vendors are always a weak link in any organisation. You can have the best security ever but, of major cyber breaches, over a third are through vendors, contractors and providers,” she said.

“We all rely on our vendors, suppliers and partners. In today’s digital age their risks are our risks. Previous methods involved primarily compliance and self reporting.

“Ours involve continuous risk monitoring of all publicly available datasets and AI-based analytics baked into our cyber risk score cards.”

Shares hit an intraday high of 15.5c on Tuesday morning.

WHK share price chart

In other ASX small cap tech news:

The trickle of quarterly cash flow releases continued this morning. The best performing of these was fellow cybersecurity stock Tesserent (ASX:TNT), with shares rising nearly 20 per cent.

The company told shareholders that all of its financial objectives for FY20 had been met or exceeded. This included being profitable on an earnings basis in the June quarter and hitting a $40m revenue target.

Tesserent also said recent acquisitions and growth had nudged the revenue figure above $50m and this is expected to increase with further acquisitions.

TNT share price chart