AI continues to become more weaponized with nation-state attackers and cybercrime gangs experimenting with LLMs and gen AI-based attack tradecraft. The age of weaponized LLMs is here.
At the same time, multi-cloud-based infrastructures more businesses rely on are coming under attack. Exfiltrating any identity data available from endpoints and then traversing a network to gain more access by collecting more credential data is often the goal.
Cyberattacks that combine AI and social engineering are just beginning
Attackers have a version of human-in-the-middle, too, but their goal is to unleash AI’s offensive attack capabilities within social engineering campaigns. Last year’s social engineering-based attacks on MGM, Comcast, Shield Healthcare Group, and others serve as a case in point.
CrowdStrike’s2024 Global Threat Report finds that cloud intrusions jumped 75% last year. There was a 76% increase in data theft victims named on data leak sites and a 60% increase in interactive intrusion campaigns. Worse, 75% of attacks were malware-free, making them difficult to identify and stop. There was also a 110% YoY increase in cloud-conscious cases.
PwC’s 2024 Digital Trust Insights Report finds that 97% of senior management teams have gaps in their cloud risk management plans. 47% say cloud attacks are their most urgent threat. One in three senior management teams is prioritizing cloud security as their top investment this year.
Gartner sees a more complex threatscape driving growth
Nation-state attackers are picking up the pace of their stealthy AI arms race. They’re looking to score offensive first victories on an increasingly active digital battlefield. Gartner predicts that in 2027, 17% of the total cyberattacks and data leaks will involve generative AI.
Another key assumption driving Gartner’s latest forecast is that by 2025, user efficiency improvements will drive at least 35% of security vendors to offer large language model (LLM)-driven chat capabilities for users to interact with their applications and data, up from 1% in 2022.
Gartner has also factored in the surge in cloud attacks and the continued growth of hybrid workforces. One of their key assumptions driving the forecast is that “by the end of 2026, the democratization of technology, digitization, and automation of work will increase the total available market of fully remote and hybrid workers to 64% of all employees, up from 52% in 2021.”
Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, Published February 29, 2024
Market subsegments predicted to see the most significant growth through 2027 include the following:
Gartner has high expectations for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) growth, stating the worldwide market was worth $575.7 million in 2021 and predicting it will soar to $3.99 billion in 2027, attaining a 31.6% CAGR in the forecast period.
Identity Access Management (IAM) is predicted to grow from $4 billion in 2021 to $11.1 billion in 2027, attaining a 17.6% CAGR. Identity Governance and Administration software is predicted to grow from $2.8 billion in 2021 to $5.77 billion in 2027, attaining a 12.8% CAGR.
Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) are predicted to grow from $9.8 billion in 2021 to $26.9 billion in 2027, achieving a 17.2% CAGR.
Threat Intelligence software is predicted to grow from $1.1 billion in 2021 to $2.79 billion in 2027, growing at a 15.6% CAGR through the forecast period.
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) is predicted to grow from $928M in 2021 to $4.75 billion in 2027, attaining a CAGR of 30.2%. Gartner believes that the market share of cloud-native solutions will continue to grow. They are predicting that the combined market for cloud access security brokers (CASBs) and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) will reach $12.8 billion in constant currency by 2027, up from $4.6 billion in 2022. Gartner continues to also see strong demand for cloud-based detection and response solutions that include endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR).
Bottom Line: Every business needs to resolve in 2022 to treat cybersecurity as a business decision first because the risk to operations and revenue are too great if they don’t.
Predictions don’t protect businesses, professional guidance does. Intending to provide every business, especially startups, with insights they can use to protect themselves in 2022, I’ve interviewed several cybersecurity CEOs. Their recommendations on what every business can do to improve their cybersecurity and avert a potential breach, ransomware attempt, or worse are provided below:
BOS Framework Founder and CEO Sashank Purighalla
Before BOS, Sashank founded and served as the CEO of 5Y Solutions, Inc., a DevOps company that provides SaaS and enterprise-class technology solutions based in the cloud, AR, VR, IoT, Media Streaming, and Big Data spaces. 5Y has offices in the US, Australia, and India. Much of Sashank’s 20+ years of experience has involved developing enterprise-class technology solutions, strong strategic and long-range planning, setting business and technology strategies in B2B and B2C environments, and leading and motivating diverse teams to build high-impact SaaS and PaaS products. Sashank has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a master’s degree in Computer Science.
Advice from Sashank Purighalla Founder and CEO at BOS Framework
“The biggest problem that enterprises are dealing with is with fractured technology architectures. The playbook for how technology systems are designed and maintained has fundamentally changed over the past 5 years with the advent of DevOps as a new disciple geared toward bringing efficiency to the PDLC process. To help meet this growing demand, there has been nearly a 570% increase in the number of known niche tools. Here’s the strange dichotomy: In the same timeframe, there has been an over 630% increase in the number of cyber breaches and over 600% increase in technology management and maintenance costs.
The fact is that you cannot patch disparate systems with non-standardized implementations using niche tools and expect to achieve security. Breach resilience and systemic integration can only result from sound systemic architectures that are based on best practices.
Enterprises must shift their focus from thinking of the next tool for efficiency or patching gaps to consistent architectures for effective holistic outcomes. This is an ecosystem problem and can only be addressed at an organizational architecture level”.
Founder Shield Co-Founder & CEO Benji Markoff
Benji Markoff is the Co-Founder & CEO of Founder Shield. He has an obsession with culture and the science behind it. He wants his legacy to be the success and positivity that everyone who works at Founder Shield brings to the world, whether at Founder Shield or in any their future endeavors. He hopes that Founder Shield provides a platform for unlimited success and happiness for all that work there.
Advice from Benji Markoff, Co-Founder & CEO of Founder Shield
“It’s old news that cybercriminals have beefed up their attacks, with ransomware and phishing topping every bad actor’s to-do list, it seems. The pandemic spotlighted weak links in cybersecurity systems nationwide, and hackers didn’t waste one minute to attack — back door, front door, didn’t matter. Hybrid work schedules and burnt-out IT specialists make the waters even murkier. Naturally, cyber liability insurance is a hot commodity currently, and the insurance industry plays a significant role in helping companies stay protected. Unfortunately, the attacks keep coming. Flip the script, though, and all these negative headlines can serve as lessons learned. For starters, let’s remember that cross-functionality value also translates to cybersecurity training. The more employers raise awareness and implement in-depth training, the lower they’ll fall on a hacker’s checklist. Keep cybersecurity top-of-mind throughout your entire company. Also, don’t be shy about relying more heavily on your managed service provider (MSP). These companies are ever-broadening their scope of services. If eyes and ears are what you need, start negotiating new MSP contracts.”
Hexnode Founder and CEO Apu Pavithran
Apu Pavithran is the founder and CEO of Hexnode. Recognized in the IT management community as a consultant, speaker, and thought leader, Apu has been a strong advocate for IT governance and Information security management. In addition, he’s passionate about entrepreneurship and spends significant time working with startups and empowering young entrepreneurs.
Advice from Apu Pavithran, founder and CEO of Hexnode
“Enterprise customers in 2022 are looking for a seamless digital experience that they can adopt immediately. Unfortunately, while catering to this need businesses tend to overlook the cybersecurity risks involved in making this possible.
In practice, cybersecurity decisions mostly take the backseat when associated with budgetary needs and business priorities, however, what comes with that is a successful ransomware attack that can completely turn the equation upside down. So, while adopting a flexible working environment in a constantly changing IT landscape, I would strongly recommend having a device security policy and a UEM in place. This helps keep your sensitive information safe by making sure employee devices are always compliant.
A patch management solution that comes along with the UEM solution will monitor your devices to make sure that there are no security vulnerabilities. The solution will also make sure that your device is running on the latest OS update and protected from threat actors.
Endpoint security solutions like UEM’s will help secure businesses to an extent, But having the right tools can’t always ensure that your businesses are 100% secure. The biggest threat is always the human element in cyber security. So make sure that in your flexible work environment your employees are cyber aware with regular cyber awareness classes that cover updated cybersecurity best practices.”
Ivanti CEO Jeff Abbott
As CEO of Ivanti, Jeff Abbott oversees all aspects of the company’s growth strategy and direction. Before becoming CEO of Ivanti in October 2021, Jeff served as Ivanti’s President since January 2020. Jeff has over 25 years of experience working for enterprise software and services companies, including Accenture, Oracle, and Infor. Jeff holds degrees from the University of Tennessee and Georgia State University. He sits on the National Alumni Board at the University of Tennessee and has previously held board positions with the Georgia Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Posse Foundation.
Advice from Ivanti CEO Jeff Abbott:
The rapid shift to remote work has accelerated growth in new digital systems and workflows, leading to expanded enterprise attack surfaces. At the same time, threat actors have matured their tactics and targeted enterprise security gaps. For example, attackers have increasingly waged phishing attacks at mobile devices, which remote workers are using more than ever before, via text and SMS messages, instant messages, social media, and other modes of communication, beyond just corporate email. Ransomware has also continued to evolve, with attackers increasingly leveraging known vulnerabilities that have remote code execution and privilege escalation capabilities. Ransomware is a business, and threat actors are incentivized to find companies that are more likely to pay.
Organizations are struggling to proactively combat these growing cyber threats. A new study by Ivanti revealed that 71% of IT and security professionals found patching to be overly complex and time-consuming. 57% of respondents stated that the global transition towards a decentralized workspace has made patch management more complex to deal with. And 53% said that organizing and prioritizing vulnerabilities takes up most of their time. This is alarming because the longer vulnerabilities remain unpatched, the more exposed a business is at risk of an attack or ransomware.
To effectively mitigate risk, companies should implement a Zero Trust security strategy. At its simplest, Zero Trust provides organizations continuous evaluation of their employee devices, endpoints, assets, and networks that business relies on. As part of an overall Zero Trust strategy, companies should invest in automated controls that proactively perform cyber hygiene tasks and reduce security risk across infrastructure and applications. This includes leveraging a combination of risk-based vulnerability prioritization and automated patch intelligence to identify and prioritize vulnerability weaknesses and then accelerate remediation. A proactive, end-to-end risk-based assessment strategy can drive business value and further reduce the mean time to detect, discover, remediate, and respond to cyber threats.
Orchestral Founder and EVP Dale Smith As Orchestral’s Head of Revenue Technology & Operations, Dale leads the digital infrastructure team responsible for integrating customer-facing operations across marketing, sales, and customer success to deliver extraordinary customer experiences that accelerate revenue performance. Dale has over 30+ years of experience in the tech industry, including several roles that include engineering, marketing, business development, and product management. His current startup, Orchestral.ai, provides AI-enabled IT workflow automation & orchestration technologies that facilitate digital transformation for some of the world’s largest enterprises.
Advice from Orchestral Founder and EVP Dale Smith
“Although there is an increasing amount of attention given to automation within the cybersecurity sector, there are still many gaps between the countless tools and SOAR/SIEM platforms found in a typical enterprise’s cybersecurity infrastructure.
To be sure, cybersecurity automation is a welcome and necessary focus for innovation in threat intelligence and response. But, as organization’s adopt cybersecurity automation, they are likely to discover that significant human intervention is still required to bridge the “silos of automation” that naturally develop around highly specialized security tools and platforms. It is at this point when the focus should shift to “cybersecurity orchestration”. Cybersecurity orchestration intelligently integrates all of the different and disparate tools, platforms and siloed automations so that information is shared across the entire cybersecurity infrastructure. In this context, cybersecurity automation and cybersecurity orchestration are complimentary stages of focus for developing security infrastructure capable of coordinating a truly “autonomous” threat response.”
Prometeo Co-Founder and CEO Rodrigo Tumaián
Rodrigo Tumaián is co-founder of Prometeo, a startup in the fintech area. He is also a co-founder of Truss, a company that provides information security services in the financial sector. His extensive experience working with national and international companies has enabled him to learn to adapt to any type of environment and help customers across a broad spectrum of business models, industries and revenue levels.
Advice from Prometeo Co-Founder and CEO Rodrigo Tumaián
“When we talk about Cybersecurity month to encourage awareness around the topic, we should keep in mind that it is something we must take action on every day. The repercussions that are caused when we find ourselves in the middle of a problem or a serious cybersecurity issue, profoundly impact our digital ecosystem. Constantly promote cybersecurity awareness – that’s what we’re focused on internally and with every customer – and we’re product of what we’re accomplishing with them and seeing them and we are very proud of what we have accomplished.”
Rapid.Space Founder and CEO Jean Paul Smets
Jean Paul is an entrepreneur, with 20 year experience and success in enterprise open source software for B2B markets. As Founder and CEO At Rapid.Space, he leads product and business development . Before Rapid.Space, Jean Paul founded Nexedi S.A the largest FLOSS publisher in the EU (4 M€ income). He founded VIFIB which invented edge computing in 2009 and contributed its technology to Rapid.Space. He holds a PhD in computer science, graduated from ENS Ulm and joined “corps des mines”.
Advice from Jean Paul Smets, Founder and CEO at Rapid.Space
“If you use a cloud service, make sure your cloud provider does not have access to your passwords or credentials (most have access and password leaks happen in average every year, as we all experienced). If you use containers, make sure you understand that they do not provide strong isolation (containers from other users on the same host may be able to access your sensitive data through security escalation, such as the one which happened to Azure in 9/2021)”
ThycoticCentrify CEO Art Gilliland
Art Gilliland is CEO at Centrify and brings proven success in the global enterprise software industry-leading large organizations in product development, enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, go-to-market strategy, and SaaS operations. He most recently was SVP/GM of the Symantec Enterprise Division of Broadcom, reporting to the CEO, where he led the integration and business operations post-acquisition. Before Symantec, Art held executive positions at Skyport Systems, HP, Symantec, and IMlogic.
Advice from ThycoticCentrify CEO Art Gilliland:
“As organizations execute on their digital transformations to adopt cloud and SaaS infrastructure it will become more essential to adopt tighter control over who has access to what. Investments in tighter controls over privileged access by using multi-factor authentication, centralizing identities, and enforcing least privilege can go a long way to securing modern infrastructure. This investment can not only make the user experience more seamless for those who need and should have access, but can also simultaneously harden defenses to reduce risk of becoming the next hack or ransomware victim.” — Art Gilliland, CEO, ThycoticCentrify
76% of enterprises increased their use of endpoint devices since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting their remote, work-from-home (WFH) and hybrid workforces globally.
66% of enterprises believe securing their networks and infrastructure requires a more focused, proactive approach to endpoint resilience that doesn’t leave endpoint security to chance.
Cybersecurity leader’s top challenges today are maintaining compliance, enforcing security standards, and understanding the health of security controls on each endpoint.
Just 38% of IT leaders can track the ROI of their cybersecurity investments, accentuating the need for more resilient, persistent endpoints that provide greater visibility and control.
These and many other fascinating insights are from Forrester Consulting’s latest study on endpoint security, Take Proactive Approach To Endpoint Security, completed in collaboration with Absolute Software. The study is noteworthy for its impartial, accurate view of the current state of endpoint security and the challenges IT teams face in creating greater endpoint resilience. The study’s methodology is based on 157 interviews with IT and security professionals located in the U.S. and Canada who are decision-makers in endpoint protection, with interviews completed in November and December 2020.
Key insights from the study include the following:
Security leaders are reprioritizing endpoint automation efforts with a strong focus on sensitive or at-risk data. In 2021 automation efforts will focus on sensitive or at-risk data (60%), geolocation (52%), security control health (48%), web-based application usage (36%), patch management (35%), and hardware inventory (32%). Each of these technologies is integral to supporting remote workers. There’s also a significant shift from how automation strategies were prioritized before the pandemic, as the graphic from the study below illustrates:
Maintaining compliance, enforcing security standards, understanding security controls’ health, and measuring security investments are the top challenges to managing endpoint security today. The majority of enterprises, 59%, cannot maintain or prove compliance of endpoints at any given time. Lack of compliance drags down the efficiency of endpoint security efforts, making an entire network more vulnerable. Just over half of enterprises can’t enforce security standards across endpoints or don’t know today’s health. The most surprising finding of the study: 62% of enterprises cannot measure the ROI of their security investments – with half (31%) – strongly disagreeing with how measurable security ROI spend is.
Enterprises see four key areas where endpoint management could improve today. Forrester asked enterprise IT and security leaders which capabilities need to be added to endpoint management systems to make them more effective. The executives first focused on securing sensitive and at-risk data, a sure sign enterprises are moving to a more data-centric cybersecurity model in the future. That’s good news as cyber attackers want to penetrate software supply chains and take control of systems managing data assets. Managing devices remotely at scale is second, which is also a frequent challenge IT and security teams encounter when attempting to patch endpoints. Having an unbreakable digital tether to devices is solving the scale issue while also providing greater endpoint resiliency, visibility, and control.
Conclusion
The pandemic forced every business to become more innovative in supporting work-from-home and hybrid work environments, improving endpoint security an immediate priority. What’s needed is an unbreakable digital tether to all devices, capable of delivering complete visibility and control, enabling real-time insights into the state of those devices, and allowing them to repair security controls and productivity tools autonomously. Of the many solutions available for securing endpoints today, the ones that take a firmware-embedded approach to secure endpoints are proving the most reliable. The more integrated an endpoint is to firmware, the more likely self-healing agents will be reliable while also providing complete visibility across every device on or off the network. Absolute’s firmware-embedded approach is noteworthy in its track record of securing endpoints during the pandemic.
Cybersecurity, privacy and security startups have raised $1.9 billion in three months this year, on pace to reach $7.6 billion or more in 2021, over four times more than was raised throughout 2010 ($1.7 billion), according to a Crunchbase Pro query today.
22,156 startups who either compete in or rely on cybersecurity, security and privacy technologies and solutions as a core part of their business models today, 122 have pre-seed or seed funding in the last twelve months based on a Crunchbase Pro query.
From network and data security to I.T. governance, risk measurement, and policy compliance, cybersecurity is a growing industry estimated to be worth over $300B by 2025, according to C.B. Insight’s Emerging Trends Cybersecurity Report downloadable here.
Today, 680 cybersecurity, privacy, and security startups have received $6.8 billion in funding over the last twelve months, with $4 million being the median funding round and $12.6 million the average funding round for a startup. The number of startups receiving funding this year, funding amounts and the methodology to find the top 20 cybersecurity startups are all based on Crunchbase Pro analysis done today.
New startups and established vendors are attracting record levels of investment as all organizations look to thwart increasingly complex, costly and unpredictable cyberattacks. There is an arms race going on between cyber attackers using A.I. and machine learning and the many startups and existing vendors whose goal is to contain them. CBInsights and PwC recently published their latest quarterly joint study of the venture capital landscape, MoneyTree™ Report, Q4, 2020. The study finds that monitoring and security deals were the third fastest-growing vertical in 2020, with Q4 being exceptional for all verticals, as the heat map below shows:
The 20 Best Cybersecurity Startups To Watch In 2021
Based on a methodology that equally weighs a startup’s ability to attract new customers, current and projected revenue growth, ability to adapt their solutions to growing industries and position in their chosen markets, the following are the top 20 cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021:
Axis Security – Axis Security’s Application Access Cloud™ is a purpose-built cloud-based solution that makes application access across networks scalable and secure. Built on zero-trust, Application Access Cloud offers a new agentless model that connects users online to any application, private or public, without touching the network or the apps themselves. Axis Security is a privately held company backed by Canaan Partners, Ten Eleven Ventures, and Cyberstarts. Axis is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with research and development in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Bitglass – What makes Bitglass unique and worth watching is how they are evolving their Total Cloud Security Platform to combine cloud access security brokerage, on-device secure web gateways, and zero-trust network access to secure endpoints across all devices. Its Polyscale Architecture is delivering uptimes of 99.99% in customer deployments. Bitglass’s 2020 Insider Threat Report has several interesting insights based on their recent interviews with a leading cybersecurity community. One interesting takeaway is 61% of those surveyed experienced an insider attack in the last 12 months (22% reported at least six).
Cado Security – Cado Security’s cloud-native forensics and response platform helps organizations respond to security incidents in real-time, averting potential breaches and security incidents. The Cado Response platform is built on analytics components that perform thorough forensic analyses of compromised systems. Cado’s platform, Cado Response, is an agentless, cloud-native forensics solution that allows security professionals to quickly and comprehensively understand an incident’s impact across all environments, including cloud and containers as well as on-premise systems. “Finding the root cause of security incidents in cloud or container environments is incredibly difficult. Traditional tools don’t support these new environments, and there is a shortage of people who know both forensics and cloud security,” said CEO James Campbell, formerly Director, Cyber Threat Detection and Response at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Our Cado Response platform completely changes how security professionals can respond to incidents in the cloud.”
Confluera – Originally mentioned as one of the 20 Best Cybersecurity Startups To Watch In 2020, Confluera’s sustained innovation pace in the middle of a pandemic deserves special mention. They are one of the most resilient startups to watch in 2021.Confluera is a cybersecurity startup helping organizations find sophisticated security attacks going on inside of corporate infrastructures. The startup delivers autonomous infrastructure-wide cyber kill chain tracking and response by leveraging the ‘Continuous Attack Graph’ to stop and remediate cyber threats in real-time deterministically. Confluera’s platform is designed to detect and prevent attackers from navigating infrastructure. Confluera technology combines machine comprehended threat detection with accurately tracked activity trails to stop cyberattacks in real-time, allowing companies to simplify security operations radically. It frees up human security personnel to focus on more important work instead of spending hours trying to join the dots between the thousands of alerts they receive daily, many of which are false positives. The following is a video that explains how Confluera XDR for Cloud Infrastructure works:
DataFleets – DataFleets is a privacy-preserving data engine that unifies distributed data for rapid access, agile analytics, and automated compliance. The platform provides data scientists and developers with a “data fleet” that allows them to create analytics, ML models, and applications on susceptible data sets without direct access to the data. Each data fleet has easy-to-use APIs, and under-the-hood, they ensure data protection using advances in federated computation, transfer learning, encryption, and differential privacy. DataFleets helps organizations overcome data privacy and innovation struggle by maintaining data protection standards for compliance while accelerating data science initiatives.
DefenseStorm – DefenseStorm’s unique approach to providing cybersecurity and cyber-compliance for the banking industry make them one of the top startups to watch in 2021. Their DefenseStorm GRID is the only co-managed, cloud-based and compliance-automated solution of its kind for the banking industry. It monitors everything on a bank’s network. It matches it to defined policies for real-time, complete and proactive cyber exposure readiness, keeping security teams and executives updated on bank networks’ real-time security status. The company’s Threat Ready Active Compliance (TRAC) Team augments its bank customers’ internal teams to protect business continuity and skills availability while ensuring cost-effective coverage and management.
Enso Security – Enso is an application security posture management (ASPM) platform startup known for the depth of its insights and expertise in cybersecurity. With Enso, software security groups can scale and gain control over application security programs to protect applications systematically. The Enso ASPM platform discovers application inventory, ownership, and risk to help security teams quickly build and enforce security policies and transform AppSec into an automated, systematic discipline.
Ethyca – Ethyca is an infrastructure platform that provides developers and product teams with the ability to ensure consumer data privacy throughout applications and services design. It also provides your product, engineering, and privacy teams with unmatched ease of use and functionality to better care about your user’s data. The company helps companies discover sensitive data and then provides a mechanism for customers to delete, see, or edit their data from the system. Ethyca’s mission is to increase trust in data-driven business by building automated data privacy infrastructure. Ethyca’s founder and CEO Cillian Kiernan is a fascinating person to speak with on the topics of privacy, security, GDPR, and CCPA compliance. He continues to set a quick pace of innovation in Ethyca, making this startup one of the most interesting in data privacy today. Here’s an interview he did earlier this year with France 24 English:
Havoc Shield – Havoc Shield reduces the burden on small and medium businesses (SMBs) by giving them access to advanced security technology that protects against data breaches, phishing, dark web activity, and other threats. The Havoc Shield platform offers comprehensive security and compliance features that meet the standards of Fortune 100 companies, making it easier for businesses working to win deals with those companies. “For a long time, cybersecurity technology has been virtually inaccessible to small businesses, who largely can’t afford those resources,” said Brian Fritton, CEO and co-founder of Havoc Shield. “We created Havoc Shield because we believe in democratizing cybersecurity for the little guy. Small businesses deserve the ability to protect what they’ve built, just as much as larger companies that have dedicated cybersecurity staff.” Since the end of Q2 2020, Havoc Shield has quadrupled its client list. In the coming months, the company aims to grow its team to help more small businesses protect themselves from threats and achieve customer trust.
Illumio – Widely considered the leader in micro-segmentation that prevents the spread of breaches inside data centers and cloud environments, Illumio is one of the most interesting cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021. Enterprises such as Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas, Salesforce, and Oracle NetSuite use Illumio to reduce cyber risk and achieve regulatory compliance. The Illumio Adaptive Security Platform® uniquely protects critical information with real-time application dependency and vulnerability mapping coupled with micro-segmentation that works across any data center, public cloud, or hybrid cloud deployment on bare-metal, virtual machines, and containers. The following video explains why Illumio Core is a better approach to segmentation.
Immuta – Immuta was founded in 2015 based on a mission within the U.S. Intelligence Community to build a platform that accelerates self-service access to and control sensitive data. The Immuta Automated Data Governance platform creates trust across data engineering, security, legal, compliance, and business teams to ensure timely access to critical data with minimal risk while adhering to global data privacy regulations GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Immuta’s automated, scalable, no-code approach makes it easy for users to access the data they need when they need it while protecting sensitive information and ensuring customer privacy. Selected by Fast Company as one of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, Immuta is headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices in College Park, MD, and Columbus, OH.
Isovalent – Isovalent makes software that helps enterprises connect, monitor and secure mission-critical workloads in modern, cloud-native ways. Its flagship technology, Cilium, is the choice of leading global organizations, including Adobe, Capital One, Datadog, GitLab, and many more. Isovalent is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Cisco Investments. Earlier this month, Isovalent announced that it had raised $29 million in Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Google with participation from Cisco Investments. Google recently selected Cilium as the next-generation dataplane for its GKE offering calling Cilium “the most mature eBPF implementation for Kubernetes out there” in its “New GKE Dataplane V2 increases security and visibility for containers” blog: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/bringing-ebpf-and-cilium-to-google-kubernetes-engine.
JupiterOne – JupiterOne, Inc. reduces cloud security cost and complexity, replacing guesswork with granular data about cyber assets and configurations. The company’s software helps security operations teams shorten the path to security and compliance and improve their overall posture through continuous data aggregation and relationship modeling across all assets. JupiterOne customers include Reddit, Databricks, HashiCorp, Addepar, Auth0, LifeOmic, and OhMD. Earlier this year, JupiterOne received $19 million in venture funding. The Series A round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with additional investment from Rain Capital, LifeOmic, and individual investors. “JupiterOne has developed a compelling product that integrates quickly, has applicability across enterprise segments, and is highly reviewed by current customers,” said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures and former CEO at Symantec. Salem now joins the JupiterOne board. “We see a multibillion-dollar market opportunity for this technology across mid-market and enterprise customers. Asset management is the first step in building a successful security program, and it’s currently a tedious, imperfect process that’s well-suited for automation.”
Lightspin – Lightspin is a pioneer in contextual cloud security protecting native, Kubernetes, and microservices from known and unknown risks and has recently announced a $4 million seed funding round on November 24th. They will use the proceeds of the round to finance continued R&D on how to secure cloud infrastructures. The financing round was led by Ibex Investors LLC, the firm’s first global investment from its new $100 million early-stage fund, and also included participation from private angel investors. Lightspin’s technology uses graph-based tools and algorithms to provide rapid, in-depth visualizations of cloud stacks, analyze potential attack paths and detect the root causes, all of which are the most critical vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
Orca Security – Orca Security is noteworthy for its innovative approach to providing instant-on, workload-deep security for AWS, Azure, and GCP without the gaps in agents’ coverage and operational costs.Orca integrates cloud platforms as an interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on environmental context. Delivered as SaaS, Orca Security’s patent-pending SideScanning™ technology reads cloud configuration and workloads’ runtime block storage out-of-band, detecting vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, lateral movement risk, weak and leaked passwords, and unsecured PII.
SECURITI.ai – SECURITI.ai is an AI-Powered PrivacyOps company that helps automate all significant functions needed for privacy compliance on a single platform. It enables enterprises to grant individual and group rights to data and comply with global privacy regulations like CCPA and bolster their brands. They collect and manage consent from multiple sources, including web properties, web forms, and SaaS applications. Their AI-Powered PrivacyOps platform is a full-stack solution that operationalizes and simplifies privacy compliance using robotic automation and a natural language interface. SECURITI.ai was founded in November 2018 and is headquartered in San Jose, California.
SecureStack – SecureStack helps software developers find security & scalability gaps in their web applications and offers ways to fix those gaps without forcing them to become security experts. The results are faster time to business and a 60%-70% reduction in the app attack surface.
The SecureStack platform’s intelligent automation manages security controls across distributed infrastructures using rules and profiles customizable by customers. SecureStack is noteworthy for its analytics and logging expertise in helping enterprises scale applications across cloud infrastructures.
Stairwell – What makes Stairwell one of the top startups to watch in 2021 is its unique approach to cybersecurity built around a vision that all security teams should be able to determine what alerts are threat-related or not and why. Mike Wiacek, the founder of Google’s Threat Analysis Group and co-founder and former Chief Security Officer of Alphabet moonshot Chronicle, leads the company as its CEO and founder. Wiacek is joined by Jan Kang, former Chief Legal Officer at Chronicle, as COO and General Counsel. Stairwell is backed by Accel Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Gradient Ventures, and Allen & Company LLC.
Ubiq Security – What makes Ubiq Security one of the top cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021 is how rapidly their API-based developer platform is maturing while gaining traction in the market. Ubiq Security recently signed commercial agreements with the United States Army and the Department of Homeland Security. This month, the startup announced it had raised $6.4 million in a seed equity investment round. Okapi Venture Capital, an early investor in Crowdstrike, led the round with participation from TenOneTen Ventures, Cove Fund, DLA Piper Venture, Volta Global, and Alexandria Venture Investments. Ubiq will use the funds to accelerate platform development, developer relations, and customer acquisition.
Unit21 – Unit21 helps protect businesses against adversaries through a simple API and dashboard to detect and manage money laundering, fraud, and other sophisticated risks across multiple industries. Former Affirm and Shape Security employees Trisha Kothari and Clarence Chio founded Unit21 in 2018 and work with customers like Intuit, Coinbase, Gusto, and Line to create a powerful & customizable rules engine for risk and compliance teams. Unit21’s highly flexible, customizable, and intelligent cloud-based system provides a configurable engine for transaction monitoring, identity verification, case management, operations management, and analytics and reporting. On October 19th of this year, Unit21 announced a $13 million funding round led by A.Capital Ventures. Additional participation includes investors such as Gradient Ventures (Google’s A.I. venture fund), Core V.C., South Park Commons, Diane Greene (founder of VMWare), William Hockey (founder of Plaid), Chris Britt and Ryan King (founders of Chime), Sumit Agarwal (founder of Shape Security), and Michael Vaughan (former COO of Venmo). Unit21 will use the new capital to grow its product and distribution-focused management team, increase sales and marketing efforts, and sell into new industries.
Bottom Line: Today’s largely-distributed enterprises need to make sure they are putting endpoint security first in 2021– which includes closely managing every stage of the device lifecycle, from deployment to decommission, and ensuring all sensitive data remains protected.
There’s a looming paradox facing nearly every organization today of how they’ll secure thousands of remote endpoints without having physical access to devices, and without disrupting worker productivity. Whether there’s the need to retire hardware as part of down-sizing or cost-cutting measures, or the need to equip virtual teams with newer equipment more suitable for long term work-from-home scenarios, this is one of the most pressing issues facing CISOs and CIOs today.
Wanting to learn more about how their customers are tackling their endpoint security challenges and how their companies are helping to solve it, I sat down (virtually) with Absolute Software’s President and CEO Christy Wyatt and Matthew Zielinski, President of North America Intelligent Devices Group at Lenovo. The following is my interview with both of them:
Louis Columbus:Christy and Matt, thanks so much for your time today. To get started, I would like each of you to share what you’re hearing from your customers regarding their plans to refresh laptops and other endpoint devices in 2021.
Christy Wyatt: We’re seeing a strong desire from organizations to ensure that every individual is digitally enabled, and has access to a screen. In some cases, that means refreshing the hardware they already have in the field, and in other cases, that means buying or adding devices. From the endpoint security standpoint, there’s been a shift in focus around which tools matter the most. When laptops were primarily being used on campus, there was a certain set of solutions to monitor those devices and ensure they remained secure. Now that 90% of devices are out of the building, an entirely different set of capabilities is required – and delivering those has been our focus.
Matt Zielinski: We are seeing historic levels of demand from consumers, as many are transitioning from having maybe one or two devices per household to at least one device per person. We’re also seeing the same levels of demand on both the education and enterprise side. The new dynamic of work-from-anywhere, learn-from-anywhere, collaborate-from-anywhere underscores that the device hardware and software need to be current in order to support both the productivity and security needs of hugely distributed workforces. That’s our highest priority.
Louis: Where are CISOs in their understanding, evaluation, and adoption of endpoint security technologies?
Christy: The journey has been different for the education market than for the enterprise market. Most enterprise organizations were already on the digital path, with some percentage of their population already working remotely. And because of this, they typically have a more complex security stack to manage; our data shows that the total number of unique applications and versions installed on enterprise devices is nearly 1.5 million. What they’ve seen is a trifecta of vulnerabilities: employees taking data home with them, accessing it on unsecured connections, and not being aware of how their devices are protected beyond the WiFi connection and the network traffic.
In the education space, the challenges – and the amount of complexity – are completely different; they’re managing just a small fraction of that total number of apps and versions. That said, as the pandemic unfolded, education was hit harder because they were not yet at a point where every individual was digitally connected. There was a lot of reliance on being on campus, or being in a classroom. So, schools had to tackle digital and mobile transformation at the same time – and to their credit, they made multiple years of progress in a matter of weeks or months. This rapid rate of change will have a profound effect on how schools approach technology deployments going forward.
Matt: Whether in enterprise or education, our customers are looking to protect three things: their assets, their data, and their users’ productivity. It’s a daunting mission. But, the simplest way to accomplish it is to recognize the main control point has changed. It’s no longer the server sitting behind the firewall of your company’s or school’s IT environment. The vulnerability of the endpoint is that the network is now in the user’s hands; the edge is now the primary attack surface. I think CISOs realize this, and they are asking the right questions… I just don’t know if everyone understands the magnitude or the scale of the challenge. Because the problem is so critical, though, people are taking the time to make the right decisions and identify all the various components needed to be successful.
Louis: It seems like completing a laptop refresh during the conditions of a pandemic could be especially challenging, given how entire IT teams are remote. What do you anticipate will be the most challenging aspects of completing a hardware refresh this year (2021)?
Matt: The PC has always been a critical device for productivity. But now, without access to that technology, you are completely paralyzed; you can’t collaborate, you can’t engage, you can’t connect. Lenovo has always been focused on pushing intelligent transformation as far as possible to get the best devices into the hands of our customers. Beyond designing and building the device, we have the ability to distribute asset tags and to provide a 24/7 help desk for our customers whether you’re a consumer, a school, or a large institution. We can also decommission those devices at the end, so we’re able to support the entire journey or lifecycle.
The question has really become, how do you deliver secure devices to the masses? And, we’re fully equipped to do that. For example, every Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop comes out of the box with Lenovo Security Assurance, which is actually powered by Absolute; it is in our hardware. Our customers can open a Lenovo PC, and know that it is completely secure, right out of the box. Every one of our laptops is fortified with Absolute’s Persistence technology and self-healing capabilities that live in the BIOS. It’s that unbreakable, secure connection that makes it possible for us to serve our customers throughout the entire lifecycle of device ownership.
Louis:Why are the legacy approaches to decommissioning assets falling short / failing today? How would you redesign IT asset-decommissioning approaches to make them more automated, less dependent on centralized IT teams?
Christy: There have been a few very visible cases over the past year of highly regulated organizations, experiencing vulnerabilities because of how they decommissioned – or did not properly decommission – their assets. But, I don’t want anyone to believe that that this is a problem that is unique to regulated industries, like financial services. The move to the cloud has given many organizations a false sense of security, and it seems that the more data running in the cloud, the more pronounced this false sense of security becomes. It’s a mistaken assumption to think that when hardware goes missing, the security problem is solved by shutting down password access and that all the data is protected because it is stored in the cloud. That’s just not true. When devices aren’t calling in anymore, it’s a major vulnerability – and the longer the device sits without being properly wiped or decommissioned, the greater the opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of those assets.
The other piece that should be top of mind is that once a device is decommissioned, it’s often sold. We want to ensure that nothing on that device gets passed on to the next owner, especially if it’s going to a service or leasing program. So, we’ve concentrated on making asset decommissioning as precise as possible and something that can be done at scale, anytime and anywhere.
Matt: Historically, reclaiming and decommissioning devices has required physical interaction. The pandemic has limited face-to-face encounters, so , we’re leveraging many different software solutions to give our customers the ability to wipe the device clean if they aren’t able to get the asset back in their possession, so that at least they know it is secure. Since we’re all now distributed, we’re looking at several different solutions that will help with decommissioning, several of which are promising and scale well given today’s constraints. Our goal is to provide our enterprise customers with decommissioning flexibility, from ten units to several thousand.
Louis:Paradoxically, having everyone remote has made the business case for improving endpoint security more compelling too. What do you hear from enterprises about accelerating digital transformation initiatives that include the latest-generation endpoint devices?
Christy: The same acceleration that I spoke about on the education side, we absolutely see on the enterprise side as well, and with rapid transformation comes increased complexity. There has been a lot of conversation about moving to Zero Trust, moving more services to the cloud and putting more controls on the endpoint – and not having these sort of layers in between. Our data tells us that the average enterprise device today has 96 unique applications, and at least 10 of them are security applications. That is a massive amount of complexity to manage. So, we don’t believe that adding more controls to the endpoint is the answer; we believe that what’s most important is knowing the security controls you have are actually working. And we need to help devices and applications become more intelligent, self-aware, and capable of fixing themselves. This concept of resiliency is the cornerstone of effective endpoint security, and a critical part of the shift to a more modern security architecture.
Matt: I think there are two major forcing functions: connection and security. Because we are all now remote, there’s a huge desire to feel connected to one another even though we aren’t sitting in the same room together. We’re modifying our products in real-time with the goal of removing shared pain points and optimizing for the new reality in which we’re all living and working. Things like microphone noise suppression and multiple far field microphones, so that if the dog barks or kids run into a room, the system will mute before you’ve even pressed the mute button. We’re improving camera technology from a processing standpoint to make things look better. Ultimately, our goal is to provide an immersive and connected experience.
Security, however, transcends specific features that deliver customer experiences – security is the experience. The features that make hardware more secure are those that lie beneath the operating system, in the firmware. That is why we have such a deep network of partners, including Absolute. Because you need to have a full ecosystem, and a program that takes advantage of all the best capabilities, in order to deliver the best security solution possible.
Louis:How is Absolute helping enterprise customers ensure greater endpoint security and resiliency in 2021 and beyond?
Christy: We spend a lot of time sitting with customers to understand their needs and how and where we can extend our endpoint security solutions to fit. We believe in taking a layered approach – which is the framework for defense in-depth, and an effective endpoint security strategy. The foundational piece, which we are able to deliver, is a permanent digital tether to every device; this is the lifeline. Not having an undeletable connection to every endpoint means you have a very large security gap, which must be closed fast. A layered, persistence-driven approach ensures our customers know their security controls are actually working and delivering business value. It enables our customers to pinpoint where a vulnerability is and take quick action to mitigate it.
Lenovo’s unique, high value-add approach to integrated security has both helped drive innovation at Absolute, while also providing Lenovo customers the strongest endpoint security possible. Their multilayer approach to their endpoint strategy capitalizes on Absolute’s many BIOS-level strengths to help their customers secure every endpoint they have. As our companies work together, we are both benefitting from a collaboration that seeks to strengthen and enrich all layers of endpoint security. Best of all, our shared customers are the benefactors of this collaboration and the results we are driving at the forefront of endpoint security.
Louis:How has the heightened focus on enterprise cybersecurity in general, and endpoint security specifically, influenced Lenovo’s product strategy in 2021 and beyond?
Matt: We have always been focused on our unique cybersecurity strengths from the device side and making sure we have all of the control points in manufacturing to ensure we build a secure platform. So, we’ve had to be open-minded about endpoint security, and diligent in envisioning how potential vulnerabilities and attack strategies can be thwarted before they impact our customers. Because of this mindset, we’re fortunate to have a very active partner community. We’re always scouring the earth for the next hot cybersecurity technology and potential partner with unique capabilities and the ability to scale with our model. This is a key reason we’ve standardized on Absolute for endpoint security, as it can accommodate a wide breadth of deployment scenarios. It’s a constant and very iterative process with a team of very smart people constantly looking at how we can excel at cybersecurity. It is this strategy that is driving us to fortify our Lenovo Security Assurance architecture over the long-term, while also seeking new ways of providing insights from existing and potentially new security applications.
Louis:What advice are you giving CISOs to strengthen endpoint security in 2021 and beyond?
Christy: One of our advisors is the former Global Head of Information Security at Citi Group, and former CISO of JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. He talks a lot about his shared experiences of enabling business operations, while defending organizations from ever-evolving threats, and the question that more IT and security leaders need to be asking – which is, “Is it working?” Included in his expert opinion is that cybersecurity needs to be integral to business strategy – and endpoint security is essential for creating a broader secure ecosystem that can adapt as a company’s needs change.
I believe there needs to be more boardroom-level conversations around how compliance frameworks can be best used to achieve a balance between cybersecurity and business operations. A big part of that is identifying resiliency as a critical KPI for measuring the strength of endpoint controls.
30% of US and UK remote workers say their organizations don’t require them to use a secure access tool, including VPN, to log into corporate databases and systems, according to Ivanti’s 2021 Secure Consumer Cyber Report.
Plus, 25% of remote workers in the US and UK aren’t required to have specific security software running on their devices to access certain applications while working remotely.
And one in four US remote workers use their work email and passwords to log in to consumer websites and apps.
Cybersecurity gaps have continued to widen during the pandemic. A noteworthy survey by Ivanti illustrates exactly how remote workers are putting organizations at risk and where enterprise security is falling short, making those cybersecurity gaps challenging for CISOs to close. Ivanti’s 2021 Secure Consumer Cyber Report outlines the challenges that cybersecurity and IT teams have faced when securing remote workers in what’s being described as the “Everywhere Workplace.” Based on interviews with more than 2,000 US and UK respondents working from home in November 2020, the survey shows that authentication and endpoint security needs to improve across all devices that employees use.
IT Organizations Need Help Closing Their Cybersecurity Gaps
Of the many lessons learned from 2020, among the most valuable are how virtual workforces need self-diagnosing and self-remediating endpoints, while IT organizations need improved unified endpoint management (UEM) as part of a zero-trust strategy. Bad actors continue to target remote workers’ privileged access credentials to gain access and exfiltrate customer, financial and proprietary data, including intellectual property. Ivanti’s survey provides insights into where cybersecurity gaps need attention first:
The most challenging threat surface to protect is a person’s identity because it’s exposed across so many threat surfaces, including personal and work devices, consumer websites, and IoT devices in homes. The pandemic is proving identities are the new security perimeter. A person’s cell phone, personal tablet, and laptop is a real-time digital definition of a person’s identity. Nearly half (49%) of US remote workers use personal devices for their jobs, often without two-factor authentication enabled. The graphic below shows how organizations can close this cybersecurity gap by adopting UEM as part of their go-forward initiatives in 2021 and beyond:
Lack of consistent security software and password standards is a big contributor to US and UK organizations’ cybersecurity gaps today. One in four remote workers can access enterprise resources without any security software in place. An even more surprising finding is that 30% of remote workers in the US and UK can access corporate data without a secure access tool or VPN connection. If a remote worker’s identity is compromised, there’s a one in three chance that their organization will be breached, enabling cyberattackers to move laterally through the company’s systems:
Protecting remote workers’ identities & devices at scale requires Zero Trust. Automating as many tasks as possible while providing a continuous and seamless user experience is the surest way to close cybersecurity gaps. Getting rid of passwords and automating two-factor authentication using Zero Sign-On (ZSO), a core part of the Ivanti platform, is proving essential today. Zero Sign-On relies on proven biometrics, including Apple’s Face ID, as a secondary authentication factor to gain access to work email, unified communications and collaboration tools, and corporate-shared databases and resources. CISOs and their teams also need to consider how mobile threat defense can better secure personal devices against phishing, device, network, and malicious app threats. Late last year, MobileIron (now part of Ivanti) received its second mention in two years in the Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q3 2020. The Forrester Wave graphic is shown below:
In conclusion, enterprise cybersecurity gaps are widening due to a combination of risky consumer behavior and a lack of consistent security for mobile workforces. And these gaps will only increase as employees increasingly work from anywhere, using their personal devices to connect to corporate resources. To secure and enable the future of work, organizations need to start implementing and maturing an end-to-end zero trust security model today by leveraging new technologies and protecting their current security technology investments.
The Pharma industry has lost $14 billion through Intellectual Property (IP) cyber theft worldwide, according to the United Kingdom Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance.
53% of pharmaceutical IP thefts and related breaches are carried out by someone with insider access, also according to the United Kingdom Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance.
The pharma industry’s average total cost of a data breach is $5.06 million, with one of the highest costs of remediating the breach at $10.81 million across all industries, according to a recent ProofPoint study.
Over 93% of healthcare organizations experienced a data breach in the past three years, and 57% have had more than five data breaches, according to the Cybersecurity Ventures 2020 Healthcare Cybersecurity Report.
Gartner predicts the privileged access management (PAM) market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7% from 2020 through 2024, reaching $2.9 billion by 2024.
Bottom Line: Having developed COVID-19 vaccines in a fraction of the time it takes to create new treatments, pharmaceutical companies need to protect the priceless IP, supporting data, and supply chains from cyberattacks.
Showing how powerful global collaboration between pharmaceutical industry leaders can be, the world’s leading vaccine producers delivered new vaccines in record time. The IP behind COVID-19 vaccines and their supporting supply chains need state-of-the-art protection comprised of cybersecurity technologies and systems, as the vaccines’ IP is an asset that cyber attackers have already tried to obtain.
Pharmaceutical’s Growing Number of Threat Surfaces Make Cybersecurity a Priority
The report provides specifics about how cyber attackers could impersonate an executive from a Chinese biomedical company known for having end-to-end cold chain expertise, which is essential for delivering vaccines reliably. The cyber attackers conducted spear-phishing attacks against global companies who support the global cold chain needed for distributing vaccines. There were credential harvesting attempts against global organizations in at least six countries known today to access vaccine transport and distribution sensitive information.
Launching a phishing campaign with the goal of harvesting details on key executives and access credentials across the cold chain is just the beginning. According to Lookout’s Pharmaceutical Industry Threat Report, some of the most significant threat surfaces are the most problematic today, including the following:
Research & Development & Clinical Trials
Collaborative research teams across pharmaceutical manufacturers globally
Scientists creating initial compounds and completing primary research to define a vaccine.
Integration of study sites at the test device and reporting system level
Manufacturing and Distribution
Plant workers’ systems, including tablets with build instructions on them
Physician & Pharmacist Networks
Distribution Channels and their supporting IT systems
Cyber attackers are taking a more synchronized, multifaceted approach to attacking Covid-19 supply chains, reiterated in CISA’s report. There’s evidence that state-sponsored cyber attackers attempt to move laterally through networks and remain there in stealth, allowing them to conduct cyber espionage and collect additional confidential information from victim environments for future operations. Cyber attackers are initially focused on phishing, followed by malware distribution, registration of new Covid-specific domain names, and always looking for unprotected threat surfaces.
10 Ways Cybersecurity Can Protect COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Chains
By combining multiple cybersecurity best practices and strategies, pharmaceutical companies stand a better chance of protecting their valuable IP and vaccines. Presented below are ten ways the pharmaceutical industry needs to protect the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain today:
Prioritize Privileged Access Management (PAM) across the vaccine supply chain, ensuring least privilege access to sensitive data starting with IP. CISA’s note finds that there have been multiple attempts at capturing privileged credentials, which often have broad access privileges and are frequently left standing open. PAM is needed immediately to institute greater controls around these privileged accounts across the supply chain and only grant just enough just-in-time access to sensitive IP, shipping and logistics data, vaccination schedules, and more. Leaders include Centrify, which is noteworthy for cloud-based PAM implementations at the enterprise and supply chain levels. Additional vendors in this area include BeyondTrust, CyberArk, Ivanti, Thycotic, Ping Identity, and Senhasegura.
Assess every supplier’s security readiness in vaccine supply chains, defining minimum levels of compliance to security standards that include a single, unified security model across all companies. In creating a secured vaccine supply chain, it’s imperative to have every supplier network member on the same security model. Taking this step ensures accountability, greater clarity of roles and responsibilities, and a common definition of privileged roles and access privileges. Leaders in this area include BeyondTrust, Centrify, CyberArk, Ivanti, and Thycotic.
Taking a Zero Trust-based approach to secure every endpoint across the vaccine manufacturer’s R&D, Clinical Trials, Manufacturing, and Distribution networks is necessary to shut down cyber attackers taking advantage of legacy security weaknesses approaches. The pharmaceutical companies and myriad logistics providers see a much faster than the expected proliferation of endpoints today. Trusted and untrusted domains from legacy server operating systems are a time sink when it comes to securing endpoints – and proving unreliable despite the best efforts that Security Operations teams are putting into them. Worst of all, they leave vaccine supply chains vulnerable because they often take an outdated “trust but verify” cybersecurity approach. Leaders include Illumio, Ivanti (MobileIron), Cisco, Appgate, Palo Alto Networks, and Akamai Technologies.
Extend the Zero Trust framework across the entire supply chain by implementing microsegmentation and endpoint security requirements across all phases of the vaccine’s development cycles. This will ensure cyber attackers don’t have the opportunity to embed code to activate later. The goal is to push Zero Trust principles to all related processes integrating with the vaccines’ pipeline, including all dependencies across the entire development lifecycle.
Incorporating Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across every system in the vaccine supply chain is a given. Usernames and passwords alone are not enough, and MFA is low-hanging fruit to authenticate authorized users. MFA is based on two or more factors that can authenticate who you are based on something you know (passwords, PINs, code works), something you have (a smartphone, tokens devices that produce pins or pre-defined pins), or something you are (biometrics, facial recognition, fingerprints, iris, and face scans). For example, Google provides MFA as part of their account management to every account holder and has a thorough security check-up, which is useful for seeing how many times a given password has been reused.
Alleviate the conflicts of who will pay for increasing cybersecurity measures by making supplier-level security a separate line item in any CISOs and CIO’s budget. Today certain pharma supply chain CISOs are expected to ramp up cybersecurity programs with the same budget before Covid-19. While there are slight increases in cybersecurity budget levels, it’s often not enough to cover the higher costs of securing a broader scope of supply chain operations. CISOs need to have greater control over cybersecurity budgets to protect vaccine IP and distribution. Relying on traditional IT budgets controlled by CIOs isn’t working. There needs to be a new level of financial commitment to securing vaccine supply chains.
Consider using an AIOps platform adept at unifying diverse IT environments into a single, cohesive AI-based intelligence system that can identify anomalous network behavior in real-time and take action to avert breaches. Based on conversations with CIOs across the financial services industry, it is clear they’re leaning in the direction of AIOps platforms that provide real-time integration to cloud platforms combined with greater control over IT infrastructure. LogicMonitor’s prioritizing IT integration as a core strength of their platform shows, as they have over 2,000 integrations available out of the box. Relying on Collectors’ agentless system, LogicMonitor retrieves metrics such as cloud provider health and billing information. This collector then pulls metrics from different devices using various methods, including SNMP, WMI, perf Mon JMX, APIs, and scripts.
Unified Endpoint Security (UES) needs to become a standard across all vaccine supply chains now. Vendors who can rapidly process large amounts of data to detect previously unknown threats are needed today to stop cyberattacks from capturing IP, shipment data, and valuable logistics information. Absolute Software’s approach to leveraging its unique persistence, resilience, and intelligence capabilities is worth watching. Their approach delivers unified endpoint security by relying on their Endpoint Resilience platform, which includes a permanent digital tether to every enterprise’s endpoint. Absolute is enabling self-healing, greater visibility, and control by having an undeletable digital thread to every device. Based on conversations with their customers in Education and Healthcare, Absolute’s unique approach gives IT complete visibility into where every device is at all times and what each device configuration looks like in real-time.
Pharma supply chains need to have a strategy for achieving more consistent Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) across every device and threat surface of the vaccine supply chain. UEM’s many benefits, including streamlining continuous OS updates across multiple mobile platforms, enabling device management regardless of the connection, and having an architecture capable of supporting a wide range of devices and operating systems. Another major benefit enterprises mention is automating Internet-based patching, policy, configuration management. Ivanti is the global market leader in UEM, and their recent acquisition of Cherwell expands the reach of their Neurons platform, providing service and asset management from IT to lines of business and from every endpoint to the IoT edge. Neurons are Ivanti’s AI-based hyper-automation platform that connects Unified Endpoint Management, Security, and Enterprise Service Management. Ivanti is prioritizing its customers’ needs to autonomously self-heal and self-secure devices and self-service end-users.
Track-and-traceability is essential in any vaccine supply chain, making the idea of cyber-physical passports that include serialization for vaccine batches more realistic given how complex supply chains are today. Passports are an advanced labeling technology that provides the benefits of virtual tracking, verification of specific compounds, and yield rates of key materials. Serialization is a must-have for ensuring greater traceability across vaccine supply chains proving effective in stopping counterfeiting. Having digital passports traceable electronically can further help thwart cyber attackers.
Conclusion
By closing the cybersecurity gaps in vaccine supply chains, the world’s nations can find new, leaner, more efficient processes to distribute vaccines and protect their citizens. It’s evident from the results achieved so far in the U.S. alone that relying on traditional supply chains and means of distribution isn’t getting the job done fast enough, and cyber attackers are already looking to take advantage. By combining multiple cybersecurity tactics, techniques, and procedures, the vaccine supply chain stands to improve and be more secure from threats.
Bottom Line: Bad actors quickly capitalize on the wide gaps in machine identity security, creating one of the most breachable threat surfaces today.
Why Machines Are the Most Challenging Threat Surface To Protect
Forrester’s recent webinar on the topic, How To Secure And Govern Non-Human Identities, estimates that machine identities (including bots, robots and IoT) are growing twice as fast as human identities on organizational networks. Forrester defines machine, or non-human, identities as robotic process automation (bots), robots (industrial, enterprise, medical, military) and IoT devices.
The webinar points out that one of the fastest-growing automation types is software bots, with 36% used in finance and accounting, 15% used in business line and 15% in IT. The webinar also points out that in 2019, there were 2.25 million robots in the global workforce, twice as many as in 2010 and 32% of global infrastructure decision-makers expect their firms to use robotic process automation (RPA) over the next 12 months.
According to the Forrester Consulting white paper, Securing The Enterprise With Machine Identity Protection, over 50% of organizations find it challenging to protect their machine identities today. Unprotected machine identities are making it easy for bad actors to take control of entire networks of devices. Bad actors rely on organizations’ bots to provide the cover they need to attack networks and devices, often undetected for months or years.
Forrester found that machine identities are left exposed to bad actors because organizations aren’t adopting the tools they need to create and manage a centralized Identity Access Management (IAM) strategy across all machines. This includes defining and enforcing policies, auditing each machine and endpoint and better integrating support across machines and monitoring systems.
Furthermore, by adopting a more modern Privileged Identity Management (PIM) approach, organizations could solve many of these challenges. Leading PIM solutions providers include Centrify, which has succeeded in adapting to the ephemeral nature of securing machine identities by delivering machine identity and credential authentication based on a centralized trust model.
The Forrester report’s bottom line is that machines are isolated, exposed and more vulnerable than any other endpoint on a network. The following graphic compares protection strategies and finds a majority of organizations struggling to deliver them:
Machine Identities Are Networks’ Weakest Security Link
According to a Venafi study, machine identity attacks grew 400% between 2018 and 2019, increasing by over 700% between 2014 and 2019. Malware capable of compromising machine identities continues to gain momentum, doubling between 2018 and 2019 and growing 300% over the five years leading up to 2019. According to Kount’s 2020 Bot Landscape and Impact Report, 81% of enterprises are regularly dealing with malicious bots today and one in four say a single bot attack has cost them $500,000 or more. Furthermore, many organizations may not realize how many bots and machine identities they have – and bad actors capable of creating hundreds using automated scripting tools.
Forrester provided the following data points underscoring how vulnerable machines are to botnet and identity-based attacks today:
The 2017 Mirai botnet attack is a cautionary tale of the dangers of using default security credentials on machines and IoT devices. Using botnets to automate scans of vast blocks of IP addresses for potential telnet ports to log into, the Mirai botnets were programmed to rapidly try a series of basic usernames and passwords to gain access to IoT devices and machines. The Mirai botnets were successful, gaining control of thousands of machines and orchestrating them to deliver one of the largest DDOS attacks in history.
It’s common for enterprises to lose track of how many bots they’ve created, giving malicious actors the perfect cover to mask their movements. Instead of creating their bots, malicious actors look to disguise their movements across a network with a company’s bots. Forrester’s webinar mentioned how a large North American insurance provider deployed 400 software bots for customer-facing digital chatbots and processing claims, among other tasks.
There’s often no oversight of who has the rights to create and launch bots internally, leading to potentially thousands of bots without secured identities. One of the most troubling findings presented during the webinar is how loose the process is to create a bot – with no checks and balances in place or means of achieving consistent identity management.
How To Strengthen Machine Security
The more challenging any machine threat surface is to protect, the more opportunity it provides bad actors to breach them. A good place to start is by clarifying who owns keeping Transport Layer Security (TLS) and previous-generation Secured-Sockets Layer (SSL) client and server certificates, code signing certificates, Secure Shell (SSH) host and cryptographic keys so they are kept up to date. Letting those fall through the cracks will leave thousands of machines exposed and exploitable on networks.
Prioritizing machine identities and securing machine credentials is a must-have in 2021, as botnet attacks are quickly increasing due to bad actors’ being able to spin up thousands of them in days. The following are key steps to get started:
Taking a Zero Trust approach to managing every machine identity authentication on a network now could save thousands of hours and dollars in the future. Taking a least privilege access approach to managing machines now will pay off in the future, as the workloads of machines and non-human entities continue to grow more complex. The Forrester webinar expands on this point by explaining how new, more complex inter-machine relationships are evolving quicker than legacy approaches to endpoint governance and security can keep up.
Privileged access controls need to be more adaptive, secure and scalable than many organizations’ static-based approaches to securing machines are today. Forrester recommends replacing long-standing hardcoded credentials with session-based ones assigned via API calls from a vault. Machines are being used 24/7 and have access patterns completely different from humans using the network, making dynamically-assigned, ephemeral credentials even more important to protect a network. Privileged Identity Management (PIM) proves effective at providing privileged access controls for machine identities, with Forrester mentioning Centrify, HashiCorp and others as leaders in this area. Centrify’s approach is noteworthy in enrolling machines with its platform via a client to establish a trust relationship, so applications running on that machine can also be authenticated using a short-lived, scoped token.
Monitoring more machines on a network often leads to a transition from legacy to integrated log monitoring systems that can capture, analyze and report anomalous activity across a network. Log Monitoring systems are proving invaluable in identifying machine endpoint configuration and performance anomalies in real-time. AIOps is proving effective in identifying anomalies and performance event correlations in real-time, contributing to greater business continuity. One of the leaders in this area is LogicMonitor, whose AIOps-enabled infrastructure monitoring and observability platform have proven successful in troubleshooting infrastructure problems and ensuring business continuity.
Perform periodic audits to track all bots and machines in use across an organization, using Microsoft Active Directory to inventory and manage all of them. One of the most valuable take-aways from the Forrester webinar is the need to manage machine identities and their credentials centrally. Forrester mentions Microsoft Active Directory as one option. The companies providing services in this area include Centrify, which pioneered Active Directory bridging to authenticate human and machine identities based on a centralized model from a single identity repository.
Conclusion
Machines, or as Forrester calls them in their webinar, non-human identities require more precise, adaptive and ephemeral identity structures and access controls. CISOs and CIOs need to take greater ownership of machine identity authentication and provide Identity Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) down to the bot and non-human identity level. With the exponential growth of malicious bots tracking machine identities, now is the time to place machine identities among the highest priority of any cybersecurity strategy in 2021.
Bottom Line: Cyberattacks enter a new era of lethal impact when threat actors are sophisticated enough to compromise SolarWind’s software supply chain with infected binary code while mimicking legitimate protocol traffic to avoid detection.
To gain greater insights into the SolarWinds breach, its implications on cybersecurity strategy in the future and what steps enterprises need to take today, I contacted Andy Smith, Cybersecurity Evangelist and an industry expert with Centrify. He explained the attack’s specifics, referencing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Alert AA20-352A, which details how sophisticated the attack is, citing the sobering fact that it is unknown if all attack vectors are identified. Active since at least March 2020, the advanced persistent threat (APT) has been identified by FireEye, SolarWinds, Microsoft and several other cybersecurity firms.
SolarWinds’ Security Advisory lists 18 known products that have been affected by the attack, including their Application Centric Monitor (ACM), Server Configuration Monitor (SCM) and Network Performance Monitor (NPM). Earlier this month, SolarWinds says the malicious code may have been delivered to nearly 18,000 customers.
Insights Into The SolarWinds Hack
Interested in dissecting the hack from a cybersecurity standpoint, I spent some time investigating the SolarWinds hack with Andy, a leading authority on Identity and Access Management (IAM), particularly around securing and managing privileged access credentials. The following is my interview with Andy:
Louis: There have been large-scale breaches before; why is this particular cybersecurity attack getting so much attention? Why is it so enormous?
Andy: What’s interesting about this particular attack is a couple of things. It follows a very traditional cyber-attack kill chain as many attacks, but the start of this one is impressive. Usually, there’s a vulnerability that allows threat actors to get into the network. What’s unique about this is the initial vulnerability is in vendor software, so it’s often now being referred to as a supply chain hack because the vulnerability was embedded as code.
The exposure to federal agencies and the attackers’ focus going after emails is especially troubling. It appears like it’s a nation/state-related incident that always heightens the exposure and is another reason it’s so large in scale. Some tools that FireEye uses for Red Team evaluation of people’s networks got exposed, so now those tools are in the hands of threat actors to do nefarious activities with them.
That’s one aspect of this hack that makes it remarkable, as sophisticated tools from FireEye are in nefarious actors’ hands. That’s one reason it’s enormous: you just gave something that was being used for good to threat actors intent on gathering as much intelligence across a supply chain of customers as they can.
Louis: How are the cyber-attack methods used in the SolarWinds hack particularly unique?
Andy: It follows a very common cyber-attack kill chain we’ve seen at Centrify for years. We ran the Anatomy of a Hack webinar earlier this year and it always starts with that initial vulnerability and getting in. What’s unique was this case is that the initial vulnerability wasn’t just, “Hey, I phished somebody’s password and logged in.” It was a vulnerability in the software build process for SolarWinds. So that’s a bit unique about how that initial vulnerability was there.
Still, once the attackers are in, the breach starts to look very traditional in the sense that they settle in, sit there for a while, scan the network, move laterally in that environment and hunt for privileged access.
All those things happened precisely by the people who investigated and then you find the data you’re going after. In some cases, it’s been software, as is the case with FireEye, or email servers, as is the case with government agencies. Attackers are patient and they wait to extract the data and then cover their tracks.
Louis: You and many others are an advocate of a layered approach to security. What is that and how would it have helped in the SolarWinds case?
Andy: For me, the biggest takeaway of this hack is that a layered approach to security is the way to go in the future in light of this hack’s sophistication. There’s no silver bullet to stop a hack this sophisticated, though. No one strategy or approach could have prevented it.
When you investigate this attack, it is pretty sophisticated and has multiple vectors to it and one has to assume there will be certain threat vectors compromised. That initial vulnerability will be there and you need those layers of security to prevent it, so you need to look at preventive controls, predictive controls and detective controls. All those need to be combined into a single, unified strategy.
For every organization looking at this hack and considering how future attacks of this sophistication will impact them, it’s a good idea to use this event as a way to get your board and executives thinking about a more resilient, hardened multilayer approach and not relying on a single solution to protect you. I see organizations using this opportunity to evaluate how a layered approach will work for their projects when it might not have been feasible to fund in the past.
It’s an extreme attack that shows how vulnerable the exposures are out there. It’s a good time to shore up your defenses. The Federal Information Processing Standard 200, or FIPS 200, the standard offers excellent guidance, including discussing the different types of layers and controls available today. Minimum Security Requirements for Federal Information and Information Systems defines the minimum security controls for federal information systems and the processes by which risk-based selection of security controls occurs.
If you dig into the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-53, that gets a little deeper into the particular cyber controls you have in place. There is guidance available. You’re not out there on your own about what the layers should be and you can evaluate yourself against these standards.
Louis: What are some layers specific to privileged access management? Are there any particular PAM best practices that enterprises should be thinking about right now?
Andy: Absolutely and I’ll start with Privileged Access Management (PAM), which is one of the core layers. Investigations into this hack found specific evidence where they got in and created new accounts with elevated privileges to access data. It’s all over this.
We typically state the Forrester stat that 80% of hacks involve compromised privileged access. This SolarWinds example is no exception: that’s what happened.
Additional points to keep in mind include the following:
Before our interview, we talked about how vulnerable passwords are and how using the company’s name, followed by 123, is not a good idea – that ties into going pro with preventive controls rather than just relying on a password. That’s a perfect example of what not to do. Organizations can design preventive privileged access controls and detective controls and both are typically provided in Privileged Access Management solutions. Best practices call for multiple preventive controls – strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, password rotation, maybe use a federated credential and have privileged users log in as themselves for better auditing and accountability.
Rethink enterprise cybersecurity from a preventive control perspective that includes least privileged access. Simplistic preventive controls aren’t enough, as the sophistication of this hack shows. Preventive controls need to be strengthened with least privilege. The account creation process needs to provide as little privilege as possible to the server level. Workflows to request additional access need to be used to provide resources for a predefined period. If these types of controls had been in place, malicious code disguised in executable files and dynamic linked libraries would not have traveled as far down the supply chain.
Lastly, even if threat actors get through or you don’t have enough of those layers in place, you want detective controls. PAM solutions should have audit capabilities that watch what privileged users do. In the financial markets, there are things like the “four-eye principle,” where people are watching what other people are doing and so you can watch a privileged session in real-time and verify what users are doing. Of course, all that’s audited in the recording. You can send that information off to a SIEM to be correlated with other data to look for compromise indicators. Recent articles I’ve read pointed out the attackers were in the FireEye network for months before being detected. FireEye detected that they had been attacked thanks to detective controls.
Louis: The SolarWinds attack seems to have rejuvenated the case for Zero Trust. How can companies adopt a Zero Trust mindset and take stock of their security layers today?
Andy: Definitely and I see organizations accelerate their Zero Trust initiatives today. Organizations can get started on their Zero Trust frameworks by reviewing the FIPS and NIST publications. Review the layers of your security stack with a Zero Trust mindset. Don’t configure your network to trust someone just because they gained access. That’s how these attackers got in, laying in the network for plenty of time. Zero Trust says, “Don’t trust that authenticated network access. That could still be a compromised credential or a threat actor,” and this is a perfect example of that. This is why Zero Trust is critical: just because they’re on your network doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy.
The concept of least privilege, of authenticating at each step, introduces segmentation. When I give access, it’s just to that machine or that service that I need access to and not broad access across the network a network segment. That’s how you prevent that lateral movement. A Zero Trust mindset that Zero Trust philosophy of security is critical in this case.
Louis: What do you think will happen from the perspective of micro-segmentation and how does this hack change the balance of security relative to ongoing operations of a business?
Andy: I think it’s another evidence of our current breach culture and brings forth more awareness. More and more, events like this will make cybersecurity a higher priority in an organization – one essential to excel at to keep a business operating. So from that perspective, it is a business enabler.
If you do it right, you can start to do things like moving to the cloud and start to do things that make you more agile. The more we can think of security as a business enabler instead of a business blocker, the better we are. Taking the lessons learned from this hack and using them to create a more resilient, hardened organization is a start.
Conclusion
80% of hacks involve the use of compromised privileged credentials and this one is no exception. An important layer of control is Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions such as Centrify, which typically involve predictive, preventive and detective controls.
In the end, it is security layers and vigilance that make the difference in minimizing the impact of a breach. NIST’s guidance can be constructive in cybersecurity planning, which can also be informed by Zero Trust’s principles. Remember, it’s not a question of if you will be hacked. It’s a matter of when and what you can do to limit the impact through layers.
Bottom Line: Cybersecurity CEOs’ lessons learned from navigating the pandemic provide a valuable framework for leading and growing a business through anxious, uncertain times.
How each cybersecurity CEO responds to the challenges of keeping employees safe, customers secure and product release cycles on schedule while still achieving customer success – all virtually – provide valuable insights into leading a company during difficult times. Simon Biddiscombe, former CEO of MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti), exemplifies the empathy all CEOs interviewed have for their employees’ welfare. “My first priority when the pandemic hit was to protect the health and safety of our employees, yet still maintain an “always-on business” for our customers,” Simon mentioned during a recent interview.
What made leading during the pandemic even more difficult was the exponentially increasing number of breaches and cyberattacks their customers are experiencing. McAfee Labs Covid-19 Threats Report found a 630% increase in cloud services cyberattacks between January and April of this year alone. The FBI estimates cyberattacks are up 400% due to the pandemic. As DevOps teams fast-track new features and releases, CEOs keep their virtual organizations cohesive and focused on the same goals.
The following cybersecurity CEOs provide their most valuable lessons learned leading through the pandemic:
Christy Wyatt, CEO of Absolute Software
About Absolute
Absolute is a leader in Endpoint Resilience solutions and the industry’s only undeletable defense platform embedded in over a half-billion devices. Enabling a permanent digital tether between the endpoint and the enterprise who distributed it, Absolute provides IT and Security organizations with always-connected visibility and Self-Healing Endpoint security.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
There was a clear moment for us where we said, “What is our objective? What is the best response to this?” And the phrase that came out was, “How can we help?” We knew our primary focus needed to be helping our customers solve a massive problem, instead of monetizing this opportunity. Making this decision to come together as a mission-driven organization… that was so incredibly powerful.
Even as life was changing drastically between breakfast and dinner every single day and employees were navigating their own work-from-home journeys and trying to care for their families, what we heard was that this ability to contribute was the thing that they were hanging onto. They were able to say, “Listen, I’m getting up every morning and I’m helping organizations with something that’s really scary and unfamiliar.” And, they did remarkable things… these teams put themselves through so much to help our customers stand up remote work and learning environments essentially overnight.
I always say you don’t win the race when you’re in the race. It’s the training and the practice, and the talking,and the drills and the teamwork… which we had been working on long before the pandemic hit. So I think my biggest takeaway is that if you put in the training upfront and you focus on doing the right things, the right things will happen. And you really can achieve more than you thought you could.
Flint Brenton – President and CEO of Centrify
About Centrify
Centrify is redefining the legacy approach to Privileged Access Management by delivering multi-cloud-architected Identity-Centric PAM to enable digital transformation at scale. Centrify Identity-Centric PAM establishes trust and then grants least privilege access just-in-time based on verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request and the risk of the access environment. Centrify centralizes and orchestrates fragmented identities, improves audit and compliance visibility and reduces risk, complexity and costs for the modern, hybrid enterprise.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
“Our customers and the people they serve are all going through rapid change. When you look at the concept of digital transformation, a lot of companies were struggling with that before the pandemic. Now we know that we can’t live without it. The role of the developer is more important than ever and they are driving innovation in a very different environment than they’ve ever experienced.
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned during the pandemic is that no matter what the obstacles are, people need connection. For a company like Centrify, that means we need to be connected to our customers intellectually, strategically, virtually and – eventually – physically.
An example of this was very clear recently, as we engaged in discussions with one of the world’s largest financial institutions to replace their existing password vaulting solution. They have a vision for where they want to be, how they are going to get there and how they are going to secure that transformation. But they need the right partner who not only has the technology capabilities and architecture for a cloud-focused, DevOps-drive, digitally-enabled enterprise, but also to understand their vision and be invested in their success.
So the CIO asked me to personally track the rollout of our product against their product enablement success and he was very interested in how our vision of Privileged Access Management will converge with cloud security, DevOps and other modern technologies and empower their vision and plan. Ultimately, he wanted connectedness. He wants a personal relationship built on understanding, honesty and accountability, even if that relationship can’t be forged and nurtured over a dinner or meeting in a conference room.
That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned leading this year: that customers, employees, partners and peers want to be connected any way possible, even if they can’t do so in close physical proximity yet.”
Steve Havas, CEO of Evernym
About Evernym
Evernym is a pioneer in the field of verifiable credential technology, which gives individuals control over their digital identity and organizations the ability to trust and verify their data. Evernym builds and deploys self-sovereign identity solutions, with the technology and go-to-market resources powering the largest implementations of digital credentials in production.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
The pandemic has been, to say the least, impactful on society and our business. The market changes have required ruthless listening to customer needs and absolute focus on delivering what’s needed today.
We’ve all anticipated a gradual convergence of the digital and physical worlds, but that timeline has been accelerated by the sudden rise in remote work/education and contactless identity verification. We’re fortunate that this is the future we’ve been building toward, although we would have never imagined many of the COVID-19 credential use cases that are now mission-critical for our customers. It’s certainly been a lesson in adaptability and prioritization.
Benji Markoff, CEO of Founder Shield
About Founder Shield
Founder Shield is a tech-enabled insurance brokerage, focusing on rapidly growing businesses that operate in emerging industries. As a broker, we have a unique perspective of protecting our clients against cyber threats and guiding them to recovery should their fall victim. We work with forward-thinking insurers using proprietary cyber risk management tools, while also offering the most innovative insurance coverage possible.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
People say that fortunes are won and lost in times like these and it certainly appears that hackers & social engineering fraudsters have gotten that memo. Over the past 6 months, we’ve seen an increase in both hacking and social engineering attacks on clients of all shape and size $5M Revenue to $500M revenue. The reports suggest that working from home has only increased vulnerabilities of company networks (or lack thereof as employees use home networks) and the ability to induce fraudulent payments from employees who might not be able to lean over to a coworker to fact check a fishy invoice. The valuable lesson? Do a cyber audit and make sure you’re training your team on spotting social engineering and phishing scams.
Anand S – CEO at Gramener: Insights as Data Stories
About Gramener: Insights as Data Stories
Gramener is a data science company that helps solve complex business problems with compelling data stories using insights and a low-code analytics platform. We help enterprises large and small with data insights and storytelling by leveraging Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Automated Analysis and Visual Intelligence using modern charts and narratives (NLG). Our Gramex platform is a low-code framework to rapidly build engaging data solutions across multiple business verticals and use cases. Our products have empowered CXOs, Chief Data Officers, Scientists, Business Analysts and others save millions of dollars by making an impact on revenue and decision making. Gramener was founded in 2010 and has over 325+ clients worldwide, 200+ employees and 5 offices globally including the United States and Singapore.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
As an SMB we leaned more towards cost optimization over premium cybersecurity tools and services, resulting in ring-fencing our office infrastructure more. Due to COVID-19, when we moved 100% remote, our cybersecurity controls fell short to defend us against external threats. We had to extend the security protocols like moving all work to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), strengthen VPN tunnel security, implement 2FA for all logins, opt for more security services from our Cloud service provider.
We accelerated digitization across operations and increased spending in Cloud security and production application security. We are revisiting our current approach and playbooks for cybersecurity.
– We are evaluating the current 3rd party service providers offering and reevaluating if they still have same level security controls in place at their end
We are conducting an accelerated implementation of Data Security protocols across the organization and not just on client specific projects. This includes updates to Information Security Policy around Data classification, Data tracking and protection.
With 100% remote operations, we are moving to VDI for all production and critical services. This means access to all data is through dedicated VPN Tunnels only. This is to mitigate any exposure to data from folks working at home.
– Our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure allows our IT teams to protect client sensitive data to a restricted cloud environment. All the tools and 3rd party cloud services required by our team members to perform their tasks are provided in the VDI. No data can be extracted or moved from VDI instances.
– All internal company data around operations, team members, Intellectual Property are a prime target for cyberattacks and ransomware. We have moved to a secure VPN tunnel architecture for all our team members to access company internal systems. Earlier this was restricted to a small group of functions. By mandating access via secure VPN tunnel our IT team has centralized visibility of all traffic across the network and can intervene quickly against any potential threats.
We are mandating 2FA. Earlier employee convenience led to not mandating 2FA for all our services. Now 2FA has been made mandatory across all services.
In order to optimize costs, we are consolidating tools used in the organization to identify overlapping functionalities and getting rid of those which are no longer required.
Apu Pavithran, founder and CEO of Hexnode
About Hexnode
Hexnode MDM is the award-winning Unified Endpoint Management platform from Mitsogo Inc. The company has been helping organizations in over 100 countries to stay agile and competitive in an increasingly mobile world. Mitsogo Inc. is a leading provider of Endpoint Management and security solutions. From SMBs to Fortune 500s, enterprises of all sizes have leveraged Mitsogo’s prowess in device management to drive business productivity and compliance. Mitsogo’s solutions adapt to the most complex of business environments.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
Navigate the path, trust your crew
Being a CEO, as lucrative as it may seem has its own little big challenges, for example, they don’t tell you that there are no off days. There are always thousands of choices to be made and tons of pathways to be chosen, but the absolute worst thing comes when we face an uncertainty that was never on the radar.
And when the pandemic hit, the team needed support more than ever, I had to switch through the roles of commander in chief, therapist, cheerleader and even at times a babysitter. After all, you have to be the rock for your employees, or else it shows. But fortunately, I was so lucky to be surrounded by like-minded people who are as passionate as the founder about our business and customers.
We had to establish a fully remote work landscape and it was not what we would have expected, it was at a time when everyone was very insecure about COVID-19. People were worried about their safety, the safety of their families and work started to slip into second gear, some of us were even having mental breakdowns. It was time to be the person that the team could look up to.
“Customer is king”, is a tired old saying but that is what Hexnode live by, we had a commitment towards our clients, so we had to provide uninterrupted service for them rain or shine. So, we made a decision that would be deemed “mad “from a financial standpoint.
We rented out hotel rooms and made guesthouses for each of our employees around the globe and ran security and screening protocols equivalent to that of hospitals. Soon the stress levels were back to normal and the team started to enjoy the atmosphere. Productivity became better than pre-COVID levels.
As a leader, your team should be able to trust that you’re going to do everything in your power to navigate them through this tough time. The greatest asset for every business is said to be “finding the right staff”, but I would say it is “how you create the right staff”. The most valuable lesson l learned during this pandemic is “When the crew is great you just have to navigate, they will pull through all the tides and storms coming your way. They always do”.
Brad Wiskirchen, CEO, Kount
About Kount
Kount’s Identity Trust Global Network delivers real-time fraud prevention and account protection and enables personalized customer experiences for more than 9,000 leading brands and payment providers. Linked by Kount’s award-winning AI, the Identity Trust Global Network analyzes signals from 32 billion annual interactions to personalize user experiences across the spectrum of trust—from frictionless experiences to blocking fraud. Quick and accurate identity trust decisions deliver safe payment, account creation and login events while reducing digital fraud, chargebacks, false positives and manual reviews.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
Open, honest, fearless communication. The Kount team has lived by this motto for more than a decade and never before has it been more tested and more relevant than in navigating the events of 2020. From moving our entire team to remote work to quickly pivoting to help our eCommerce businesses handle dramatic changes in transaction volume, it’s essential that our team communicate at the highest levels. As the impacts of the pandemic are often deeply personal, open, honest, fearless communication has empowered us to balance individual needs, customer needs and company needs while uniting us in our mission to do whatever it takes to stop digital fraud for our customers.
Simon Biddiscombe, former CEO of MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti)
About MobileIron
MobileIron is redefining enterprise security with the industry’s first mobile-centric security platform for the Everywhere Enterprise. MobileIron’s platform combines award-winning and industry-leading unified endpoint management (UEM) capabilities with passwordless MFA (Zero Sign-On) and mobile threat defense (MTD) to validate the device, establish user context, verify the network and detect and remediate threats to ensure that only authorized users, devices, apps and services can access business resources in a “work from everywhere” world.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
As a leader during a pandemic, you must go above and beyond to provide your employees and customers with world-class service and support. My first priority when the pandemic hit was to protect the health and safety of our employees, yet still maintain an “always on business” for our customers. At MobileIron, we quickly enabled our employees around the world to work remotely. We also made it as easy as possible for our customers to issue more corporate-owned devices or enable a BYOD program to keep their employees secure and connected – whether they were working on the frontlines or at home. And we continued to innovate to meet the changing security needs of our customers and communities.
Overall, the pandemic has crammed years’ worth of change into a few short months and it will have long-lasting effects on how, when and where we work in the future. Work in the future will be very different to work in the past, which will present leaders with some challenges. However, it will also offer some significant opportunities to overhaul working practices and support employees who work from home with better collaboration and more intuitive access. The “Everywhere Enterprise” is not a passing phase, it’s the current reality and will continue to grow and expand as workers find new ways to be productive from anywhere.
Ward Osborne, CEO of Osborne Global Security
About Osborne Global Security
Osborne Global Security is a new player in the security space. They are challenging the stereotypes that come to mind when you originally think of security and replacing them with the ideas of trust, care and a shift in general security culture. This is a fascinating company to watch in the future.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
As CISO’s for multiple companies through this pandemic, we have seen so much shift and change. There’s been borderline chaos in many companies – and chaos ALWAYS brings opportunity. For our clients, the ones we’ve worked with and developed mature, risk and capabilities based models for just this situation, they are thriving.
It’s interesting to see the world adapt to a virtual delivery model which we’ve been creating, living, evangelizing for 25 years. Our clients who may not have had the time or prioritization to develop those models and capabilities have taken a hit, but we continue to do what we do, which is develop and provide resilience and growth to our customers.
In a virtual and distributed world, Trust becomes a major factor in every conversation. If a customer can’t Trust that we are there to solve problems when things get tough, then they aren’t able to operate effectively knowing that someone has their back.
Our world has become physically disconnected, but the people and companies that deal with that challenge in a proactive and positive way will always thrive. We are here. Growing our tribe. Doing the next right thing and leading customers to success in the midst of all of this chaos and challenge.
Rodrigo Tumaián, CEO and Co-Founder of Prometeo
About Prometeo
Prometeo provides a single point of access to banking information, transactions and payments across multiple financial institutions in Latam. Inspired by PSD2 and with high security standards, Prometeo brings easy plug & play access to open banking, the future of financial services. Currently, Prometeo is connected with more than 30 financial institutions across 9 countries of Latam (including México & Brazil) and provides access to more than 45 APIs.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
Prometeo was born with a very strong focus on cyber-security, so the pandemic had no effect on our operation. Our company grew up with the foundation of mobility and work flexibility, this forced us from the beginning to think about the best way to transmit data and protect mobile assets. So when the pandemic arrived, we were already providing remote access (VPN) to all our employees, limiting access by profile. We were already using two-factor authentication to access our services. We already had user nomination and record of the operations generated by our employees on our assets. I think if I had to mention what was the most valuable thing we learned from the pandemic, it’s that the direction we took from the beginning was worth it. We didn’t have to deal with operational issues to handle the high demand for digital products from customers, we just did it. So the pandemic for us strengthened another of our fundamental values, not to make security to be compliance, but to make integral security, both within our company and for our customers.
Jean Le Bouthillier, CEO of Qohash
About Qohash:
Qohash delivers advanced data classification and monitoring capabilities to protect your personal, health, corporate and financial data using transformational technologies such as machine learning and analytics.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
2020 has accelerated digital transformation efforts and highlighted the need for advanced, lightweight data security capabilities. With enterprise employees working increasingly remote, data is flowing faster and in previously unimagined ways. Businesses realize that to keep up with the demands of clients and a digital workforce, data risk models need an update or risk jeopardizing the enterprise.
Qohash clients recognize that the employee Risk Score, a quantifiable measure of trust, mitigates the impact both of bad actors as well as busy, distracted employees.
Remote, digital work will be a part of enterprise operations for the foreseeable future. Organizations need to enable governance risk and compliance teams to better support this transition to Work From Anywhere [WFA] models where talent and business thrive.
Jean-Paul Smets, Founder and CEO RapidSpace
About RapidSpace
Rapid.Space is a cloud provider whose “approach is based exclusively on the use of free, fully auditable and reversible software, hardware and management procedures under open licenses. Thanks to a network of 228 points of presence, Rapid.Space has global presence including in mainland China. It covers similar features as the most sophisticated public cloud provider and introduces exclusive innovations such as industrial edge computing and private 4G/5G vRAN.
“What are the most valuable lessons learned leading through a pandemic?”
“Rapid.Space learned during the pandemic how to formalize its management procedures and remotely setup points of presence. Thanks to Augmented Reality and smart glasses, Rapid.Space team in Europe and Americas could setup remotely its points of presence in mainland China and Taiwan without having to travel by air plane”.
