Amir Husain: There are lots of examples where we found binaries that were not registering on any one of the 60 different anti-virus engines and yet our machine learning anti-virus capability gave them threat rating as high as 80%. As we actually investigated the envelope manually, we discovered that there was an embedded threat, and
Sramana Mitra: I have a question in that context. There’s a lot of processing going on midstream of traffic coming in. Is it all happening in real time? How do you deal with delays and latencies? Amir Husain: First of all, we’re not blocking things until the final answer arrives. In other words, we’re not
Sramana Mitra: Let’s take one of your customers and double-click down. In that use case, what I’d like to understand is where is the traffic being intercepted, how is it being modelled, what parameters is it being modelled against, and what is the nature of the AI algorithm driving this kind of predictive modelling. Amir
This interview could just as well be a part of our Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence (TLAI) series. It sits at the cusp of Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence, an area where much is happening. Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to SparkCognition. Amir Husain: I’m the Founder
Sramana Mitra: Lift yourself to the 30,000 foot industry perspective level. If you were to start a company in cyber security today, what open problem would you focus on? Manoj Leelanivas: I would start with data. The issue right now is basically that there is too much data. People are struggling to find information from
Sramana Mitra: There is a window before your system is able to figure things out when something may have gotten into the enterprise, but then you would know that something has gotten into the enterprise and do something about it. Is that correct? Manoj Leelanivas: Yes. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t matter
Sramana Mitra: The example you gave about the propagated malware, does that mean that your system scans every ad that comes into the screen of any employee of your client enterprise? Manoj Leelanivas: Yes, anything that is coming to an employee on any of the vectors. In this case, it’s going to a web page.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another couple of examples like this. You said your main differentiation and where you’re innovating the most is in unearthing threats that are unknown to the enterprise. I’m trying to understand what kinds of threats are unknown to the enterprise that your work has helped you figure out. Manoj Leelanivas: Definitely,