Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 1)

CISOs are flooded with Cyber Security Vendors trying to sell them solutions. What are they looking for?

This and other topics are kicked around in this insightful interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as TrapX.

Greg Enriquez: I’m the CEO of TrapX Security. TrapX is a security technology provider and services. We provide deception technology and assist enterprises in providing a duplicate of their real network. We provide a shadow network or deception technology in their environment so they can fool attackers and protect themselves from threats in the cyber environment.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. We’re going to get in with how you on this with use cases. Before we do that, let’s get a little bit of details about the company. Where are you located? Is this a venture-funded company or a bootstrapped company?

Greg Enriquez: TrapX is headquartered in San Mateo, California. We were founded by two individuals in Israel. Our founders started the company in 2011 with their own money. They took on venture funding in January of 2014. We just completed a B Round last month. The founders took the first round of $5 million and we added $9 million just recently.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s a mid-stage company roughly speaking?

Greg Enriquez: It is. We have products and customers.

Sramana Mitra: Great. That’s the best kind of conversation for this series. What about you? Do you come from the security space?

Greg Enriquez: I do. I’ve been in the security space for about 15 years. My last employer was FireEye. I actually worked for a company called Mandiant, which was acquired by FireEye. I left FireEye several months ago and joined TrapX to be the CEO.

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Let’s start with understanding the lay of the land. What’s happening in the space that drives you to have this deception environment for enterprises?

Greg Enriquez: That’s a great question. Advanced threats, advanced attacks, and serious breaches are not going away. They just continue to hit the press, major enterprises, social organizations, governments, and so on. It’s a way of life. As the Internet and access to information becomes ubiquitous and everybody’s device is connected, these attacks will continue. The industry has been stepping up their defenses for these attacks for many years now. Since 2000, we’ve seen security grow and grow. You have to stay ahead of the attackers. Continued innovation in the area of advanced threat defenses is important. That’s where TrapX comes into play.

We provide a new approach than the current layer of defense and we add to that stack. What I like to say about the company is we participate in the security ecosystem. We promote interoperability with current tools. We provide another approach through deception to fool the attackers. Deception, in itself, is 4,000 years old. It’s been used in warfare. It is a technique and we are in a war with advanced attackers. Deception is a technique that good security teams need to use. A recent finding by Gartner in their analysis of this new area said that up to 10% of security budget will be spent on deception technologies by 2018. TrapX is right in the middle of that space. We’re the leader right now in deception. We continue to innovate in that area.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX
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