Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni (Part 1)

Alex bootstrapped Datablink from Brazil to $7.5 million addressing cyber fraud. He discusses the trends in his current markets – Brazil and East Asia – as he gets ready to penetrate other markets.

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

Alexandre Cagnoni: I’m was born in Brazil and graduated with a Computer Engineering degree. Datablink is a Cyber Security company that was founded in Brazil in 2007. At that time, we were called BrToken. We targeted the authentication and transaction signing market. Our main focus was the >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2017: RANK Software, Toronto, Canada

According to Gartner, 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017 and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020. This explosion in the number of connected devices is also multiplying the potential for cyber-attacks.

Toronto, Canada-based RANK Software provides a security analytics platform called Virtual Advisor to Security Analysts (VASA) that leverages Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for cyber security solutions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Markus Jakobsson, Chief Scientist of Agari (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve been in the cyber security space for a long time. Talk to me about what trends you see that are worth noting. Especially, what are some open problems out there that new entrepreneurs need to look into solving?

Markus Jakobsson: Cyber security defenses are often lagging behind. Many of the big and traditional companies are rather risk-averse when it comes to departing from their previous product strategy. You could see that, for example, in the antivirus market where antivirus products work pretty much the same as they dd 10 years ago. They’re a little bit faster with the updates these days than they were then.

Essentially it’s the same idea. They have a crew of people who identify threats and then they find what’s called signatures – identifying sequence of bits that are associated with threats. They >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Markus Jakobsson, Chief Scientist of Agari (Part 2)

Markus Jakobsson: My work at Agari now is to identify the trends, preferably, before they even start becoming noticeable to others and identify how to block them.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers are primarily using Agari?

Markus Jakobsson: A large number of companies use a product that blocks scammers from spoofing companies. Many of them are in the financial sector, or are insurance companies and health service providers. The set of enterprise customers who use the second product in order to protect themselves and their own enterprise users is slightly smaller, but is largely the same. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Markus Jakobsson, Chief Scientist of Agari (Part 1)

The recent phishing fiasco involving Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta hoodwinked even the IT staff of the campaign. It goes on to show how vulnerable traditional security systems can be to advanced attacks. This interview tackles some of the current developments in email fraud prevention and related topics.

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

Markus Jakobsson: I am the Chief Scientist at Agari. Agari is a company that addresses email-based threats. The threats being things like cyber attacks mounted over the last few years and intensified. John Podesta’s suffering is one example. Business email compromise attacks is another one. A third one is ransomware. That’s the spectrum of attacks that Agari addresses.

Agari protects about 10 billion emails a day. It has two types of customers. There are the customers who want to preserve and protect their brand name to avoid >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Leo Taddeo, Chief Security Officer, Cryptzone (Part 5)

Leo Taddeo: We’re going to see more focus on data privacy and protection and controlling access to content in an enterprise. That dovetails with this trend towards using Big Data for business analytics. Here’s what I mean. There’s tension between allowing employees access to data they need and maintaining privacy and confidentiality of data. Those two things need to be balanced.

They’re difficult to balance because classification and access management becomes difficult in a large enterprise. The trend towards allowing our employees to access the data they need for analytical purposes is in tension with our need to maintain privacy and confidentiality of records. I think cyber security vendors who can manage the very fine granularity and tight control of what a person can access will provide real value to a trend that is emerging and developing. That is a trend towards really focused use of large datasets to analyse business problems. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Leo Taddeo, Chief Security Officer, Cryptzone (Part 4)

Leo Taddeo: What some people spend a lot of time on is embrace the return on investment type of calculation. We’ve seen studies where people have put a dollar value on a loss of a data record. It’s somewhere between $80 and $200. Then they count up the number of records that they have, potentially, at risk, and do a simple multiplication.

Then they’ll say, “Our return on investment is in the tens of millions of dollars because we could potentially use all of these records, and they cost a hundred dollars each.” That appeals to a numbers-oriented enterprise but to me, it doesn’t have a lot of value because the numbers are so subjective. It looks like data, but it’s not. It looks like a formula, but it’s not. We see some breaches where the data loss can be very small but impactful. We see other breaches where there’s a lot of data loss and not so impactful. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Leo Taddeo, Chief Security Officer, Cryptzone (Part 3)

Leo Taddeo: The second challenge I think a lot of them are facing is the complexity requirement and the specialization of the IT security staff that they need. CISOs in every private enterprise and in every government agency out there are competing for the same talent. They’re competing for the same experts. The lack of these experts and the cost of these experts is driving up security cost. It’s bringing security down because the turnover in security personnel reduces the security posture for an enterprise. >>>