Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The question that still lingers in my mind is from a user’s point of view, people are getting signed-up for newsletters by marketeers left, right, and center. I get signed-up for random email newsletters all the time that I have not signed up for. This is becoming a standard practice in the email marketing industry. You find email addresses and you just sign them up. It’s hard to keep up with this level of random emails. I can just see how, in 10 years, this is going to be a lot more. That’s one issue that bothers me.

On the counterpoint of this is, as an email marketeer, I run a company that uses email marketing. If there’s an automated system that blocks all emails, that makes me feel very uncomfortable because then our messages don’t get through to the people that we need to get through to.
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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There are a couple of points that I want to explore that are beyond cyber criminals. There is a question that arises out of all the things that you said, which is about email marketing. Email marketing is not a cyber criminal activity. Email marketing is a legitimate form of marketing that people use very expansively. If you think of it from a marketeer’s point of view, it’s a very effective form of marketing.

If you put an engine like yours that basically filters everything that is email marketing related, does that mean that email marketing, as a field, is going to die in due course?

Georges Lotigier: No, not at all, marketing emails are useful, we provide tools to manage them through our Graymail Management solution. We think that the future of the mailbox is what we call as inbox zero. To do so, we provide an auto classification of low priority emails (advertisement, social network communication and newsletters) because these messages we don’t need to see immediately has to be in a specific folder. Of course, users are able to received these emails in the primary inbox if they consider they are important. We also provide an unsubscription tools to manage e-subscription and let the user keep what really matter for him. Our vision is that, if marketing emails are in specific folder, users can have look when they want, after the morning rush for example. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That’s interesting. Of course, email volume is going to continue to go up. The volume of spam and unsolicited email is going to go up. Email marketing is going up. People who are sending you marketing messages through email is going up. This is one part of the trend. How and what do you extrapolate from that? What are the implications of that?

Goerges Lotigier: It’s all about money. Cybercriminals are using cloud services, then build very easily 200 IP addresses for one hour and send spam emails with them. The more the cloud service is free and easy to use, such free web hosting, the more the cybercriminals have the ability to attack using these infrastructure. Cybercriminals are very organized and win a lot of money doing that. We see that the quantity of phishing, for example, is increasing at 40% per year. An other example, in July, we had 300% more viruses more than last year.So with all these methodS to spam the world, the quantity of information we have to manage is huge and still rising. In order to manage it we use a big data approach to analyse in real time and block threats in live mode. This is also one of Vade Retro’s innovations for more reactivity against more and more sophisticated and targeted attacks.  >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What else do you want to share with our audience?

Greg Enriquez: I think you have an interesting environment. You asked the question about what’s going to happen in the future. I think this conversation about Internet of Things and the growth of devices makes security a more interesting and challenging problem in the future.

Sramana Mitra: I think it’s going to be an absolute nightmare. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down a bit. When you talk about email filtering management, email started becoming mainstream back in, let’s say, 1995. For 20 years, email filtering has been around. Can you talk about the evolution of where it was and where it is now, and why what you’re doing is significant?

Georges Lotigier: We think that email will remain the only independent and universal way for communicating. Some people say that email is dead because there is a lot of different ways of communication. However, the quantity of email is increasing and there is no substitute to email when you have to make transactions or for official communication in the business. So there is more and more email. That is the reality today and that probably will be the reality tomorrow. Because of that, it’s really difficult to manage the quantity of email. That is why we are unique. By providing Graymail Management solution that combines an auto classification of email stream with an automated unsubscribe feature without any compromise on security. Even with a poor security level on the SMTP protocol, we are able to secure our customers’ email environment against most advanced threats such targeted phishing or polymorph viruses. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are you looking at when it comes to open problems? Of course, cyber security is a big threat with the Internet of things and more and more digitization. The threat of cyber security exponentially increases every year. Where would you point our entrepreneur audience to dig for open problems to solve?

Greg Enriquez: We went from millions of devices to billions of devices, to now trillions of devices. Where is the security problem? I could say, “I have 10,000 end points I have to protect.” Do you really? I had one example of a customer who was talking to an attorney of his. There was some merger going on. He said, “I need to see that contract.” The attorney said, “Here. Let me show you on my device.” Is that information leaving your organization in the hands of a service provider that has the same level of protection that you have? We’re dealing with trillions of devices. The problem is, one, categorizing and understanding your assets and making sure that you have a thoughtful plan to protect your assets with varying levels of security depending on how those assets are controlled. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 1)

Email security and the future of email is our topic of conversation in this interview. Very intersting discussion on email marketing as well.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a bit of background about Vade Retro. Tell us about the company. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Georges Lotigier: I am a serial entrepreneur. We were two associates. Together, we have created about 10 different companies. Unfortunately, my associate left two years ago. I’m the President and CEO. I manage three companies now and Vade Retro is one of them. We have founded companies in IT, mainly in security.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Georges Lotigier: Our headquarters is in Hem, France. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of market uptick are you seeing in adopting a solution like yours?

Greg Enriquez: What we’re seeing in the market today is that deception technology is gathering the attention of sophisticated security teams. Recently at the Black Hat Conference, there were a number of workshops on deception technologies. What’s happening is, in the world of getting an active defense, security teams no longer want to sit back and wait to be attacked. They don’t want to look through thousands of alerts to determine it’s the bad guys.

They want to take a proactive approach and be a little more offensive about their defense. The benefit of something like a decoy is that we give high fidelity alert. If we’re touched, it’s pretty much a conviction. We know someone who shouldn’t be doing something has touched us. Instead of giving you thousands of alerts to sort through which one is bad, we give you very few alerts with high reliability that it’s >>>