Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is a window before your system is able to figure things out when something may have gotten into the enterprise, but then you would know that something has gotten into the enterprise and do something about it. Is that correct?

Manoj Leelanivas: Yes. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t matter what the exploit is. You need to find out what the implication is. If somebody downloaded something by accidentally clicking on the site, it doesn’t necessarily mean that person is infected. If that person downloaded and opened the file, then that person probably is infected, but that doesn’t mean that something has happened in the enterprise. If now it’s propagating to a high-value target, it is not a millisecond thing.

We really are going out for these targeted attacks, which have a long dwell time. It takes almost a year for them to find the target. It took almost three months to actually become the real attack. These are the ones that are slow, sophisticated, and trying to go after your crowned jewels. They’re going after the intellectual property. That’s what we predict. If you’re a large bank, it could be the customer data or the financial data, which can have huge implications on the market. We focus on the ones that have dwell time, target you, and put you on the newspaper. That is what we focus on.Sramana Mitra: Just to play hacker here, if I were thinking of what the next malicious problematic thing to do to upset people and cause damage, I guess what you’re telling me is I need to find a way to get into a system and immediately do something before your system is able to intercept.

Manoj Leelanivas: Correct. That is a very rare thing if you’re going after a crowned jewel because crowned jewels have multiple levels of protection. It takes you a while to get to the right credential, and from the credential, to go to the right data centre or the machine. Then get exfiltrated without being noticed. It has to take time.

Sramana Mitra: Let me follow up on what you wanted to cover about your ease of installation. Tell me what makes it difficult to install a security system. Why does it take a year to install a security system? What do you do differently that lets you install something very quickly?

Manoj Leelanivas: This is great because I have already given you the background. This has been the bane of the security industry for the last two decades. Security has always been about appliances. If you look at enterprise, the biggest challenge they face is that they’re multinational enterprises. They have hundreds and thousands of sites in different places.

Imagine the burden when they have to ship appliances of different sizes and forms across different countries with all kinds of stuff in the middle. We completely eliminate that by supporting general purpose machines, general purpose servers, and anything general purpose that you can virtualize. Large enterprise customers use vCenter and vSphere and send our virtualised collectors remotely and get it up and running. They can get it up and running in minutes. That is the ease of deployment I’m talking about.

There are enterprises who are working with us who have told us that the firewalls that they have purchased a year ago haven’t been deployed yet. You can go use vCenter in a single place. You can send all these virtual workloads, get all the collectors up and running, and then cluster up as many cores as you want. You’re talking about, at most, a week in terms of getting into the enterprise’s workflow. That’s the reason why we have the largest entertainment provider as a customer. That’s the reason why one of the largest human transporters is our customer. They saw that ease of use coupled with advanced detection.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort
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