Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Potts, CEO of Lancope (Part 1)

Atlanta, Georgia has become a mini hub for Cyber Security companies. Lancope is part of that ecosystem. This conversation is an exploration of the network security side of things.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Lancope.

Mike Potts: I’m the President and CEO of Lancope. I’m a 20-year-industry veteran who has been in the software security since the evolution of mainframe security technology, which was where I started my career with a company called MSA. Then, I ran a company called Jacada, which we took public. We helped interface to the web legacy applications. I, most recently, ran a software security company called AirDefense, which was acquired by Motorola. That’s a quick recap of my experience in the industry, which leads us to Lancope. We are a network security company that provides network visibility and security intelligence to some 750 global customers at present. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I got it. Let’s actually take this forward. Now, I’m going to ask you to go up to that 30,000-foot level and talk to me about the application of artificial intelligence into the field of cyber security. In more general terms, what are some of the things that you’re seeing? Who’s doing what? What else can be done? What are other open problems that can be solved in this mode?

I was at a talk last night on artificial intelligence and startup opportunities in AI was advertised. Everything was discussed except for startup opportunities in artificial intelligence. It was not well moderated. Part of it is because it’s complex. I think the person moderating couldn’t really get to the heart of things. I do believe that security is an area where artificial intelligence is having a direct impact right now.

Mark Jaffe: It is. I think what’s interesting is that the state of the industry is such that, today, the best practices in machine learning and the advance thinkers in machine learning are building these supervised models. They’re cranking out more and more use cases. I think what we’ll >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If I understand correctly, you have this behavioral detection data anlaysis going on. The machine learning is correcting things. As new use cases pop up, the system administrators can set up new heuristics on what the machine learning algorithm should be doing in an unsupervised mode to correct those.

Mark Jaffe: It’s not to correct them as much as they can use our single platform to deploy new use cases within a minute. They can initially use the product to identify DNS tunneling accurately in their environment.

Sramana Mitra: They can identify a set of use cases that are causing these alerts. Then they come up with remedies for those. They can program those remedy elements in an unsupervised learning mode into your machine learning algorithm. Is that what you’re saying?
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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think the data-driven approach is growing for sure. The follow-up question to that is, do you have direct competitors that are following exactly your approach?

Mark Jaffe: There are a lot of competitors who are applying machine learning to solve the data problem. I couldn’t even name them. Since this interview started, investors have probably put money into another one because it’s a hot space. The question is how do we compete in that market? The best way to explain that is to share what we see and what customers come to us for. We’re uniquely positioned to help larger organizations that are centrally collecting data. They want to build a center of excellence around a single behavioral analytics platform that they can use for user-based security, network security, server security, database security. They want to use it for operations. They may have tentacles into IoT. They may have business data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert (Part 3)

Mark Jaffe: The challenge in building Prelert and this sounds like a simple approach, is learning normal behaviors from billions and trillions of terabytes of data per day and being able to do that accurately. It turns out to be really hard. That’s what Prelert is all about – having cracked the code to be able to give our customers a handful of alerts that represent real indicators of compromise.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What kind of adoption are you seeing in the industry for what you are offering?

Mark Jaffe: There’s been transition. The adoption has been really good. In the first quarter, we grew almost 300%. We’re growing nicely now. I think there are still candidates for adoption because a lot of security teams are still struggling to get the existing approaches up and running. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert (Part 2)

Mark Jaffe: So I met Steve Dodson who’s the CTO of Prelert. Steve and I founded the business with the goal of automatically gleaning insights from those logs that are today missing and therefore lead to long undetected breaches and operational issues.

Sramana Mitra: Can you walk us through, in some detail, exactly how the detection is happening? I assume you’re selling to enterprise customers?

Mark Jaffe: Enterprises and to other vendors but mostly to enterprises. Let me explain that. I think it’s a really good question because I think there’s a lot of different approaches to solving, what we generally categorize as, advanced persistent threats. The best way to describe that in our approach is to recognize that most approaches try to solve the problem by identifying behaviors of some sort that are indicators of compromise. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It remains to be seen. The last question is if you look at the trends, what are some open problems? Not what you’re solving but problems that you see out there that you think needs to be solved and you recommend other entrepreneurs go after and solve.

Georges Lotigier: I think there are two big trends. Because the quantity of information is increasing in an explosive way and the problem appears to be the ability to manage the quantity of information. You can see that email today is more and more being considered as the main way to archive information and documents. The quantity of information to store is incredible. There are a lot of different possibilities today for new technology in that field. The second point, in my opinion, is as we exchange more and more information and as databases get bigger, the security in the cloud is very critical. There needs to be an opportunity to create other companies in this space. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert (Part 1)

Applying Artificial Intelligence to Cyber Security is a significant trend. Read my interview with Mark Jaffe to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to Prelert and to yourself.

Mark Jaffe: Prelert is leading a new emerging space that we call machine learning anomaly detection, which is a category of behavioral analytics. We’re building a behavioral analytics platform to enable IT operation and security to end the days where breaches go undetected for hundreds of days and where IT operations problems go undetected for periods of time. I founded Prelert about six years ago.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Mark Jaffe: The company is based just outside of Boston in Framingham. >>>