Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have one last question which is slightly in a different direction. I was recently at a seminar. One of the events in the seminar was a kid’s panel. All these various age groups were saying that they hardly use email. They use messaging. They use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and all these messaging tools. What do you make of this trend?

Georges Lotigier: I’m thinking that they probably don’t choose the email but they will probably use it in a work setting and especially in college. Email is the official  and the most effective way to communicate in organizations.

Sramana Mitra: What do you make of Slack then and those kinds of trends?
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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: 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 >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on how you do what you do. Let’s say I’m an enterprise. How am I interfacing with your technology?

Greg Enriquez: If you are an enterprise and you’ve got a security team of two people or 200 people, you’re looking at a layered defense to protect your environment. You have to have a perimeter defense. You have to have end-point defense. At least, some form of anti-virus. Maybe, an IPS system. A good security defense will have multiple layers of tool to protect their environment and they’ll have diligent professionals following up on those alerts. Where we come into play is we build a gap. When the perimeter is breached and the security team is not aware of it, we will find it first because we operate inside the network by putting decoys and traps inside your network that attackers will touch if they breach your perimeter. >>>