The world of security products is often self-contained in its own technological bubble. I believe that\u2019s because of some cultural issues in the security sector. Up to this point, most security tools have been created for IT and IT security teams, and they are almost entirely defensive in their function. These tools were created from the vantage point of the IT person: they\u2019re focused on the infrastructure and systems that IT people know, and they are built such that IT people are comfortable configuring them. It\u2019s a technology bubble.
But hackers don\u2019t care about the things an IT person knows about, and they don\u2019t think the way an IT person thinks. They don\u2019t really care if the pathway to their objective is within the organization\u2019s main systems, or through some inactive and forgotten asset, or through a third-party holding the organization\u2019s data. They\u2019re just looking for that easy win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the last 30 years, organizations have been trying to defend themselves from the inside out with a \u201cguard the castle\u201d approach that\u2019s only become more fragmented and less effective with each new wave of threats and defensive tools. Organizations will never be secured solely by internal defensive strategies and tools, no matter how many they use or how great their budget.
At CyCognito, we are approaching enterprise security from an operational point of view, an entirely different perspective from the \u201cguard the castle\u201d view that shapes every other security product. Much of what we do is more closely related to mass-scale search engines and analytics engines than to security. It\u2019s a unique and inherently operational approach conducted on a massive scale that is far removed from how most security tools are developed and operate.
Instead of looking at an organization as a functional IT system, we start with an external perspective and think about an organization as a constellation of vastly distributed, often undiscovered or unmonitored targets. An organization\u2019s threat-scape is something spread across the broad expanse of the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rob Gurzeev first approached me in 2016 with the idea of evaluating an organization\u2019s attack vectors through the same sort of lens that attackers use, and I was immediately interested. Proactively, methodically and automatically discovering the sorts of exposures that attackers hope to find when probing a target was an intriguing new approach to enterprise security, and true \u201cuncharted territory\u201d. Using the latest large-scale data science techniques to analyze and prioritize those attack vectors would be a satisfying challenge to tackle. I signed on, and today CyCognito is charting a new category of solution, one that puts the power of nation-state-scale reconnaissance into the hands of security professionals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We started to think about architecting our solution based on the perspective: If you’re somewhere \u201cinside\u201d the internet and you point a flashlight in the direction of the company you\u2019re targeting, what do you see?
Similarly, the CyCognito platform looks for those first points of exposure that attackers will encounter when they set their sights on an organization. That\u2019s our unique approach.
As a commercial security offering, the CyCognito platform operates at unprecedented scale. It covers a lot of ground \u2013 the whole internet \u2013 to give customers accurate, actionable, high-quality data. Helping the world\u2019s largest companies find the far-from-obvious assets in their IT ecosystem means rigorously scouring all across the internet, identifying connections between assets that are not clearly or traditionally related. The kind of connections that, when discovered by sophisticated attackers who are poking around, provide an open conduit into the customer\u2019s data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n