Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: IRONSCALES CEO Eyal Benishti (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’ve talked about the who. What happens in the what? I’m doing this manually. I don’t have a big system like yours protecting me. I do have enough experience to know that this doesn’t make sense. I check the email address. Then I check the offer, eyeball, and pass. What are the heuristics of the what?

Eyal Benishti: Just to be clear, with AI, ML, and the new way of doing things, humans will always be part of the solution. With a solution like IRONSCALES, AI can do 99% of the job. It can do very impressive things when it comes to prediction and predicting things that it has never seen before.

Technical controls and algorithms have limitations. Your AI and your models are just as good as your data. If your data is not strong enough, no machine will be able to help you. You ask how you deal with the what at scale. You leverage AI and deep learning in order to do NLP. What is the intent behind this message? Is it asking someone to do something they’re not supposed to do?

We’re seeing a lot of phishing emails. We can feed them into the machine and tell the machine that this is what a bad email looks like. There are about four million phishing emails created every day. This is not something we can track manually.

One of the unique things that IRONSCALES is doing is, we’re utilizing crowd wisdom. We encourage users to report when they see something suspicious. All of a sudden, we have real-time information and we can feed it back into our machine. It’s a fantastic integration between humans and machines where AI is complementing the things that a human being is not so good at.

If someone is sending an email to lRONSCALES, one of us could miss that because small l and I look pretty much the same. This is something that will not fool the machine. The machine will say, “I can see an anomaly. Someone is trying to impersonate the brand.” If someone is getting an email in a new language and the machine cannot find any resemblance, this is where the human element can come in and close the loop.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You are solving the problem for the enterprise and I presume the higher-end of the mid-market. What’s happening in small businesses? What’s happening with consumers? Are there players addressing it?

Eyal Benishti: We see more managed service providers. We see the small IT vendors. They’re starting to take more responsibility and add more capabilities. We see them getting into the security domain as well and providing cybersecurity-managed services. The trend for them is to take a solution like IRONSCALES and add it to the portfolio and hand it over to their customers. We have many thousands of SMB customers that are getting this service from MSPs.

Sramana Mitra: To sell to MSPs, do you have a multi-tenant product?

Eyal Benishti: Yes, multi-tenant with a single pane of glass. It’s very easy for them to set up new tenants, configure them, and extract reports.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a trend in the cybersecurity space of working with an MSP?

Eyal Benishti: It’s a growing trend. We see the larger organizations looking at MSPs as a solution. There is a huge skill shortage. Some of them just need an extra hand. Some of them need someone to take control after people are going home. Some of them completely hand over their security to an MSP. Some organizations don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We see many companies trying to do the same. It’s definitely a trend.

Sramana Mitra: How many MSPs are out there?

Eyal Benishti: Tens of thousands in the US alone.

Sramana Mitra: You are doing IRONSCALES. You are solving the phishing problem. Where do you see other open problems that somebody else should solve?

Eyal Benishti: There’re many problems as things are changing and progressing. We’re solving one problem, but we’re getting three more. Social engineering is a big one. We see attacks via SMS, WhatsApp, and collaboration tools.

When we think about it, the user is the new endpoint. It’s no longer the laptop, mobile phone, or tablet. The user or the application is the one that is being targeted. In most cases, it’s a user that was targeted. Looking at what people are interacting with like social media, organizations are not doing anything around that. It’s a big attack surface.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a problem we are all facing constantly. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: IRONSCALES CEO Eyal Benishti
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