Aviva Zacks
Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective had the chance to sit down with Dan Larson, SVP Marketing at Arctic Wolf, and found out how his companies technologies are changing the cybersecurity landscape.
Safety Detective: How did you get into cybersecurity and what do you love about it?
Dan Larson: I have always loved technology, and throughout college, I held numerous roles working within the IT department on campus. Upon graduation, I was able to use my experience to get a job at General Electric working for their healthcare division. The position was in an IT leadership program where I had the chance to do a rotation of different departments. One of my rotations was in cybersecurity, and I absolutely loved it. I saw how critical it was to the business and how it always required staying on the cutting edge of technology, and both of those aspects really appealed to me.
SD: Can you give me an overview of your company’s products?
DL: Arctic Wolf delivers personal, predictable protection from cybersecurity threats through an industry-leading security operations center (SOC)-as-a-service. Our two core solutions, Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response and Managed Risk, are anchored by the Arctic Wolf Concierge Security Team. The Concierge Security Team act as the trusted security advisor to an organization’s IT team by providing security guidance and conducting both routine and non-routine tasks to improve their security posture.
- Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response
Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response solution is delivered by the Arctic Wolf Concierge Security Team, on the foundation of the industry’s only cloud-native security operations platform. It provides 24×7 monitoring of an organization’s networks, endpoints, and cloud environments along with a managed approach to detection, response, and recovery from modern cyber threats through managed triage and concierge services that guide you along your security journey.
- Arctic Wolf Managed Risk
Arctic Wolf Managed Risk solution enables organizations to scan their networks, endpoints continuously, and cloud environments to quantify digital risks such as vulnerabilities, system misconfigurations, and account takeover exposure to benchmark the current state of your environment. Over time through strategic guidance of the Arctic Wolf Concierge Security Team, businesses harden their security posture and proactively prevent breaches from occurring.
SD: What industries use your products?
DL: Most businesses lack the internal resources to address the high cost, complexity, and additional personnel that is required to build an impactful security team. This makes any organization that needs to protect itself against cyberthreats a potential Arctic Wolf customer. Arctic Wolf provides these IT-constrained companies with the scalable managed cybersecurity protection needed to keep their valuable business data safe.
Some of the most common industries we serve include healthcare, legal, finance, manufacturing, and local governments.
SD: What are the worst cyberthreats out there today?
Whenever organizations think about threats, I think it is important that they focus on preventing both opportunistic attacks and targeted attacks.
Opportunistic attacks are persistent and pervasive; they never go away, and we always have to deal with them. This is why, year after year, we continue to see phishing as a top attack vector. It’s a simple tactic to execute, can be done in large volumes, and all it takes is one person to click on the wrong link for it to be successful.
At the same time, targeted attacks continue to grow in prominence and are impacting more and more organizations. An example of these types of attacks is the proliferation of fileless malware. Because these attacks run in memory rather than as a file on your computer, they are difficult for endpoint solutions to detect. That’s why advanced threat detection and response solutions are rising in popularity with many organizations.
As for emerging threats, as businesses move their application workloads and infrastructure into cloud environments, data breaches caused by misconfigured cloud environments – and general poor cloud security hygiene – are becoming an everyday occurrence. Gartner predicts that through 2022, at least 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the organizations’ fault, so it is vital that businesses develop a strategy for building cloud security best practices into their operations.
SD: How has the Covid-19 situation changed cybersecurity for the future?
COVID-19 is disrupting “business as usual” and forcing organizations to quickly implement contingency plans. For cybercriminals and scammers, this has been an opportunity to benefit from chaos and uncertainty. An example of this is that phishing emails alone have risen over 600% since the end of February 2020.
Even when the threat of the pandemic has passed, organizations won’t simply return to the familiar comfort of business as usual. It is likely they will make substantial permanent changes to their operations for the long haul, which will also bring new cybersecurity challenges for companies.
One of the most significant changes I’d expect is for businesses to provide more remote work opportunities to their employees. By having more employees working from home, this expands the threat surface that needs protecting, and will further tax constrained security teams.
