Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Lift yourself to a 30,000-foot level and tell me the emerging trends and what are you seeing out there by way of white spaces and open opportunities.

Fred Wilmot: One of the very large trends is that there’s huge amassing of espionage tools that are beginning to get more mature. We used to talk about script kitties taking advantage of more advanced software. Now we have organized crimes producing software with the same software development lifecycle that I would produce as a security vendor. That’s impactful. They can make their crime more effective.

That’s becoming more pervasive in the sense that as we continue to commoditize these tools, we start to see more influence around services-driven crimes. Crime-as-a-Service has become something very topical as a result of mass compromise and the ability for us to inject the types of behaviors in the systems that we don’t necessarily understand. Some of those that are becoming more prevalent as well as hacker tools that are being released in the market are going to be very interesting from a detection perspective in the future.

It’s not the standard, low-base level. I can use something that exists on the system to do things that it’s not supposed to do. We’re seeing things that don’t leave any residue on a system capable of compromising the system. Those are the trends that we’re seeing which is over the top of what everybody will tell you, like ransomware. Those are particularly challenging to find. It requires a substantially larger amount of visibility into your own infrastructure than what most people are used to.

Sramana Mitra: If you were starting a new company today, is that an area where you would start something?

Fred Wilmot: If I were to start something today, it would be something that was more centered around ubiquity of consumer products in the industrial control space. Give me a service that allows the person at home to pay some small amount of money a month and monitor all of my devices internally as well as all activities going out of my house as well. Consumer understanding of the problem is close to an all-time low given the amount of potentials that are circling about from a risk perspective. That will significantly help us understand how to mitigate risk that we don’t see or understand right now.

Sramana Mitra: This is all getting very tricky, actually. I find it very uncomfortable – the amount of cameras in the house and so forth. What can be controlled and hacked is very uncomfortable. Maybe for somebody who’s less technical, it’s not as uncomfortable. I know the possibilities really well.

Fred Wilmot: My kids understand Facebook. They don’t understand what happens when the cameras at school gets turned against the school. As you said, that’s the piece that worries me the most. Awareness is the biggest piece. While you can’t prevent it, you can certainly understand it and take some actions.

Sramana Mitra: I just don’t think that people will become terribly aware. You and I becoming aware is not the issue. The rank-and-file becoming aware is the issue. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Society as a whole needs to protect consumers somehow. Those things are still up in the air.

Fred Wilmot: I completely agree with you. But it doesn’t mean we can’t fight the fight. It’s necessary. It’s not the people that are never going to learn what the value and risks are but the people that can learn that you want to make the impact with. Every single one of those is influential to a group of people that are around them. It needs to become a bit more of a movement.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled
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