Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Lift yourself to the 30,000 foot industry perspective level. If you were to start a company in cyber security today, what open problem would you focus on?

Manoj Leelanivas: I would start with data. The issue right now is basically that there is too much data. People are struggling to find information from data. There is too much data out there and you don’t know what to process and what is meaningful for you. If I were to look at it with a blank slate, I would look at something that is in the boundaries of multiple industries.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking you a question purely from a cyber security point of view. We have a huge Big Data coverage. Tell me specifically what is an open problem in cyber security that is worth following today.

Manoj Leelanivas: I was going to get there. If you look at data and where security is relevant going forward is because we have cars and homes, which are connected now. It’s gone beyond the enterprise IT environment. Everything is getting connected. With all of this things, how can you look at information and gather the right information?

It’s a massive Big Data problem when it comes to security. You cannot amass this data and say, “I want to look for a key.” You want to do it the other way around where you need to look at specific patterns or anomalies you see. It may not be relevant to an actual incident, but you need to start looking at those smaller pieces and work yourself up to the data.

It’s almost inverting the triangle, so to speak. Instead of going from a large amount of data and trying to find the needle in a haystack, you have to know what does the needle look like, and then build up more and more data. There may be paths where it’s not the right way to go and you just stop there. That will be a good way to look at it.

Sramana Mitra: Putting it in context of the discussion we just had about Cyphort, there is probably a lot of unknown stuff in the huge pool of data that is amassing all over the world through all these devices and interactions. Only a portion of what needs to be looked for is known, right?

Manoj Leelanivas: It doesn’t need to be known.

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that there are parameters of a threat type or class that you’ve identified, model that, and then run it on massive amounts of data and see what other variations of that you can find?

Manoj Leelanivas: Correct. What are the new patterns you see from that and start building up on that. That’s a different way to look at it.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort
1 2 3 4 5 6