Akshat Jain, Co-founder and CTO, CYWARE and his partner Anuj Goel, started Cyware five years back with a vision to transform the way cybersecurity works at enterprises worldwide by bringing the benefits of virtual cyber fusion and collective defence solutions. The duo realised that organisations were lagging behind cyber threat actors who were becoming more organised and even gaining nation-state backing in many cases. This led them to envision a future where security teams are not constrained by manually-driven security strategies, where threat intelligence and automation help address a myriad of use cases, and where the focus is on proactive incident response instead of post-incident containment processes. Jain talks about the current cybersecurity space and how being the sole provider of virtual cyber fusion centre, they solve the collaboration challenges faced by security teams within organisations. Edited Excerpts.
What was your drive to enter into an already crowded and competitive cybersecurity market?
While the cybersecurity industry features a large swathe of solutions for different security functions, we are focused on breaking silos and connecting them in virtual cyber fusion that will shape the next generation of security infrastructure.
Our virtual cyber fusion suite combines strategic and technical threat intelligence (TIP), and incident response technologies (IR Platform) with advanced security automation and orchestration (SOAR) to help security teams manage their existing toolset to detect, respond to, and mitigate all kinds of threats. Being the industry’s only provider of virtual cyber fusion centre, our solution solves the collaboration challenges faced by security teams within organisations and empowers them to centralise all security operations through a single platform. To put the pieces of the pie together, we built our virtual cyber fusion solution that sits at the intersection of all the key security functions to integrate the entire security structure into a single, streamlined unit.
In the Indian industry context, many organisations are still following reactive strategies and are at a nascent stage in their cybersecurity maturity progression. Today, organisations need to adopt information sharing practices and accelerate their feedback cycles to achieve collective defence against the evolving threat landscape. This is where Cyware’s solutions play an important role.
With the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak being so rampant in our country, how has Cyware played its role in the situation?
It is no surprise that the norm of remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic has caused an expansion in the potential attack surface for organisations. Cybercriminals, including nation-state threat actors, have pounced on the opportunity with increased ransomware attacks, supply-chain and remote access attacks. Cyware’s threat intelligence solutions help organisations prepare for these threats by shining a light upon the indicators of compromise (IOCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by the attackers.
Using our SOAR solutions, Cyware’s customers are leveraging automated workflows to tackle these threats with minimal human intervention, thereby making the job of remote security teams much easier. Apart from the operational hiccups, the pandemic has also highlighted the need for collective defence against increasing cyber intrusions. Cyware’s virtual cyber fusion solutions are helping organisations navigate these challenging circumstances by enabling collaboration between siloed security functions and among industry stakeholders to fight this battle together.
Please explain the technologies of Cyware’s SOAR solutions. How are they helping organisations from advanced threat attacks?
Cyware’s SOAR solutions enable organisations to build automated cross-functional workflows that can orchestrate a cloud-based, on-premise, or hybrid infrastructure. The myriad of tools and technologies that did not interact with each other, now become interoperable with the help of our SOAR solutions. This means security teams can coordinate complex threat response workflows involving both human and machine-driven actions to drastically reduce the time spent on manual, repetitive tasks and accelerate the process of eliminating threats from the affected network and systems. While our threat intelligence automation capabilities help connect the dots between disparate threat elements and historical intelligence to detect potential threats, the SOAR capabilities transform the response side of the equation, thereby resulting in a quick and effective resolution against advanced threats.
What are the threat factors that one should look out for in the virtual workplace today?
Today’s virtual work environments are paving the way for a fully digitised and connected world. However, this transformation is bringing new threats and security risks to the fore. The hazy nature of today’s digital boundaries adds to the challenges in evaluating cyber risks, while threats faced by vendors, suppliers, and partners also increasingly become an existential risk for an organisation’s supply chains. As offices have entered the homes of employees, cyber adversaries are looking for unconventional ways to infiltrate company networks by targeting the humans in the loop. Organisations must leverage situational awareness, real-time alerting, and actionable threat intelligence to analyse and prepare for such emerging threats and to remain resilient in the face of an unprecedented operating environment.
