Cybersecurity Stack Report - 2023

Portfolio company Threater released its annual Security Stack Insights Report.

The report is based on a survey of 200+ cybersecurity professionals (C-level to managers). Unlike many cybersecurity reports that emphasize on the nature of the cybersecurity vectors and remediations for enterprises, this report emphasizes on how cybersecurity professionals in small and large organizations are making decisions on budget, processes, technology, and platforms. I encourage you all to read this report. I am confident that you will find some nuggets of insights from this report that will be helpful to you and your leadership.

I am a firm believer in building a new generation of data-driven cybersecurity products that can help overworked cybersecurity professionals outperform in their roles and provide "clear-box" transparency and control for organizations.

One area of outperformance in cyber defense is to keep the bad actors out so the bad actors do not enter and then linger inside organizations' perimeters to find a "host" or vulnerability to attack. Yet, most organizations still rely on old technology (Firewalls) to keep bad actors out. The simple analogy is that we have locks (and Ring) to keep thief out of our houses. Right now, our houses have bad locks.

This is why I love Threater's data-driven technology. It has a powerful lock for the door. Today, it blocks 1 billion threats for its clients. Based on sampling, we know that majority of the 1 billion threats would have been let through by the old technology. It's not the fault of the firewalls. The firewalls are not built to counter the modern traffic flow and throughput, threat intelligence data workload, and attack types. When Threater shows what has been let through by the firewalls, the initial reaction of their clients is disbelief. It's not the cybersecurity professionals' fault, it is the the old technology's fault. When they pair the old technology in their stack with Threater, they get the outperformance they need on cyber defense. Less noisy for SIEM. More time for other value-added work. Highly likely a reduction of threat analyses and remediation work later on.

Another area of outperformance in cyber defense is the prevention of data leakage. I am not talking about the intentional data hacks (which most people focus on). I am talking about data privacy and security tools for data APIs and data portals that inevitably "leak" certain data for downstream tasks. If you are building companies in the space, I would love to hear what you are building.

In January 2024, publicly traded companies must disclose material cybersecurity incidents. This is a good move by the SEC but it addresses only one side of equation (i.e., disclosure and compliance). The other half of the equation is enforcement. The result we all want is few cybersecurity incidents. To reduce cybersecurity incidents, we need to enforce a rigorous posture for each part of the cyber defense workflow, starting with the "lock of the house." We need a modern cybersecurity stack that is more nimble, cost effective, and can work for small and large organizations alike. We need to augment the old technologies and enable organizations to be able to do this.