Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 1)

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 and CEO of SparkCognition. SparkCognition is an Austin-based cyber security company that’s looking to apply artificial intelligence to the security of physical assets as well as cyber assets. There’s this notion of cyber-physical where the world of IoT is now merging with digitally-controlled cyber systems and that creates a lot of new security challenges that our artificial intelligence and cognitive software is looking to address. We’re basically looking at the nexus of the industrial Internet with the use of artificial intelligence to solve security challenges. >>>

Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is the financing history beyond that $2 million Fidelity and General Catalyst round?

Andre Durand: I would say after about two years roughly, in very traditional fashion, we started raising money to fuel our growth. I think we raised about $30 million in total between 2003 and 2012. In 2013, we made a decision to switch our business model from a perpetual software license to a subscription business model.

Sramana Mitra: You waited till 2013 to make that shift?

Andre Durand: We did for a couple of reasons. Number one is we were selling infrastructure to big enterprises. While they are open to buying applications on a subscription model, their infrastructure decisions are measured in 3 to 10 year increments. They didn’t really want to be buying infrastructure and visiting a subscription decision every year. Almost all of their infrastructure was purchased on a very traditional basis. That was number one.

Number two was that it wasn’t until we began offering our own cloud service that our own business model was bifurcated. We knew that was not optimal. We >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 6)

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 data. There is too much data out there and you don’t know what to process and what is meaningful for you. If I were to look at it with a blank slate, I would look at something that is in the boundaries of multiple industries.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking you a question purely from a cyber security point of view. We have a huge Big Data coverage. Tell me specifically what is an open problem in cyber security that is worth following today. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 5)

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 what the exploit is. You need to find out what the implication is. If somebody downloaded something by accidentally clicking on the site, it doesn’t necessarily mean that person is infected. If that person downloaded and opened the file, then that person probably is infected, but that doesn’t mean that something has happened in the enterprise. If now it’s propagating to a high-value target, it is not a millisecond thing.

We really are going out for these targeted attacks, which have a long dwell time. It takes almost a year for them to find the target. It took almost three months to actually become the real attack. These are the ones that are slow, sophisticated, and trying to go after your crowned jewels. They’re going after the intellectual property. That’s what we predict. If you’re a large bank, it could be the customer data or the financial data, which can have huge implications on the market. We focus on the ones that have dwell time, target you, and put you on the newspaper. That is what we focus on. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 4)

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: It could be mobile as well.

Manoj Leelanivas: It could be a mobile as well. Let me just siphon off things into two different parts. One is say you’re on a Windows or a Mac machine and you’re doing web surfing or email, we can see that right there because it’s coming through the enterprise. If it’s the mobile device on WiFi, we see it through the enterprise too. For a mobile device that is completely encrypted that is not on the enterprise, we cannot see it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Pat Donnellan, CEO of Lumeta (Part 3)

Pat Donnellan: In the UK, there is a directive issued by the Bank of England which stipulates that on an annual basis, each licensed financial service organization operating in the UK is subject to a cyber analytics audit where a live malware is injected into the network of the financial services organization. The audit was determined on how that organization responds to that particular live threat. We operationalize how the financial services organization deals with that. There are pending legislations that stipulate an extension of what the UK is planning where enormous buying is being proposed for financial services organization who do not have, in essence, control over their network and are unable to effectively respond to malware threats.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the industry in general. You’ve already started talking to some extent about the industry in general. Talk to me about what are the open problems. Where do you encourage entrepreneurs to look for problems to solve in the cyber security space? More specifically, in the areas you monitor more closely than others. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Pat Donnellan, CEO of Lumeta (Part 2)

Pat Donnellan: The third part, which is a subset of the real-time product, is that we have built a Hadoop engine that enables the storage of what we’re gathering so that if there is an event – an incident response required – around a particular time, a particular network, a particular region, and a particular set of IP addresses, we can enable you to forensically zone back prior policy of storage to that particular set of circumstances. Again, looking at the real-time movements over a specific period of time.

More recently, we’ve added the capability of taking the threat intelligence libraries of known bad actors and being able to test in conjunction with our product in real-time whether or not your enterprise is now exposed to a particular bad actor. Whether you have within your organization a functioning device that has been zombied, that is the third strand of what we do. We crawl the network akin to how Google crawls across a multitude of databases to gather information. We crawl recursively, right out to the edge of the network and beyond, if required, to enable you to continuously understand your network. We make sense of that. We enable you to prioritize with our Hadoop engine the five things that are priority policy. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Pat Donnellan, CEO of Lumeta (Part 1)

A different snapshot into the Cyber Security world… can the vulnerability management providers actually see the entire network?

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Lumeta.

Pat Donnellan: First of all, let me introduce Lumeta. Lumeta is a New Jersey-based company in the cyber security space. The software was originally conceived within the environment of Bell Labs to facilitate the US government DOD to understand, at that point, the Internet. It was originally conceived as a scanning and mapping tool to identify devices and IP addresses on a worldwide basis. That was the original concept. It evolved when a number of investors that put a lot of money into it to build it out. I, along with a number of other individual investors, bought the business just over two years ago. In essence, we bought it on the premise that the future of cyber security centered on real-time as opposed to continuous.

There’s a big distinction there. Real-time network situational awareness – meaning in enterprises and government agencies, the basic premise of Lumeta is without our product, you do not understand your network. You have a 15% to 20% visibility gap in devices, networks, IP addresses, and >>>