Aviva Zacks
Aviva Zacks interviewed Nyotron CEO Sagit Manor and asked her where she thinks cybersecurity is headed and how her company is stopping cyber attacks.
Safety Detective: Tell me about yourself and what drew you to cybersecurity.
Sagit Manor: My background is finance and coming from the payment industry, cybersecurity is a completely different market and different industry. I’m amazed at how interesting this industry is, how complicated it is, how many players there are, how many categories within cybersecurity exist and how, at the end of the day, no one besides us can completely stop unknown threats and zero-day attacks.
SD: What industry does your company serve and why specifically those?
SM: As a startup, we carefully analyzed the main industries that are severely suffering from cyber-attacks and focused on them. And what we found out is that highly regulated industries are suffering the most—healthcare, state and local government and law enforcement, gaming, and aviation.
We believe that highly regulated industries need several layers of defense. Our solution is very unique and can work together with many other solutions that exist in the market.
SD: What can you tell me about PARANOID?
SM: PARANOID is the name of our flagship solution and it’s the industry’s first solution, based on the OS-Centric Positive Security model. It acts like the last line of defense, to make the endpoint security stronger. PARANOID focuses on the operating system and its behavior. We map all the legitimate ways of performing the potentially damaging activity at the operating system level, and through that, we stop threats that no one has seen before and threats that antiviruses tend to miss.
The fact is there are just a few major areas of the operating system functionality that malware will have to touch in order to manipulate data on the OS, and that’s what we’ve mapped. So, when a hacker tries to encrypt, corrupt or exfiltrate data, even in a sophisticated way, we are prepared for it and can stop it. There are millions of hackers and viruses, and everyone is trying to stop the attacks from getting into the system, and we’re doing the exact opposite. We believe that hackers and their tricks are infinite. Hence, if you focus on the “bad,” you will always be playing catch-up.
We call ourselves the next generation EDR (endpoint detection and response) because we have a solution that no one else has, we are not only analyzing and detecting but preventing unknown threats and zero-day attacks.
SD: Tell me about the Nyotron War Room.
SM: The War Room provides very deep, forensic-level visibility and analytics. We provide an agent for endpoints, which are your laptop, desktop, or servers. The agent is what protects you from unknown threats and zero-day attacks. The War Room is where we see the attacks, where we analyze the data, and where we see the storyline behind the malicious activity.
The CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) needs that precise level of visibility and that advanced protection from sophisticated attacks. Antiviruses typically stop between 50% and 95% of viruses and malware at the gate, but the remainder represents millions of attacks that they can’t stop. PARANOID stops the attacks, while War Room provides visibility and analytics. The analytics behind every attack is almost as important as stopping them, and we do both. So that’s our offering in a nutshell.
SD: Where do you see cybersecurity in the next five years?
SM: I believe that the cybersecurity era will continue to be very complex and with many players. There are thousands of companies in the cybersecurity business. Although many believe that consolidation will be a key factor in the next few years, I believe that hackers’ sophistication will continue to grow, leaving many enterprises vulnerable.
Per Gartner, Endpoint prevention and endpoint detection and response, which are the two markets that we are involved in, were a $6.13 billion market in 2018 going up to $7.52 billion by 2022.
This is a growing market that will continue to be important because CISOs really want to know that they are fully protected, that they can sleep well at night, but also that the solutions that they work with are easy to deploy and easy to maintain. I can give you a great solution but at the end of the day, if you need 15 people to manage it, that’s not helpful. That’s not cost-effective.
