Are you getting ready for the upcoming Black Hat USA 2023 event, an internationally recognized cybersecurity event providing the most technical and relevant information security research, now in its 26th year. The event is quickly approaching, taking place August 5-10, 2023, returning to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, NV with a 6-day program.
Ahead of the show, VMblog received an exclusive interview with William Bradley, Senior Director of Marketing at Next, a leading provider of data protection solutions for organizations with valuable data who need to uncover risk, educate employees and fulfill security, compliance, and regulatory needs. You’re going to want to make sure you get them on your MUST SEE list.
VMblog: Before we get into it, can you give us a quick overview of the company? What should folks know?
William Bradley: Next provides insider risk and data protection solutions for organizations with sensitive data that must educate employees, uncover risk, and fulfill security, privacy, and regulatory needs.
In the last few years so much has changed… From everyone working in the office, on the company managed network, with managed hardware and software. To now, everyone is scattered, with people working at home, in cafes and on their couches. But one thing that hasn’t changed: data is still the crown jewel of every organization.
Next has reinvented data protection for today’s distributed organization. We took a unique approach to data protection, from both the product and how we built it, to how we are growing our company.
We took an engineering first approach, by that I mean we started with the product. Our product is cloud native and was launched in 2020. In the last couple of years, there has been close to a million R&D hours invested in the development of Reveal.
Reveal is field tested. From F100 finance and retail, to fast growing startups. We have close to 100 employees and have recruited a proven leadership and services team that have decades of experience in data protection.
VMblog: You are sponsoring the upcoming Black Hat USA event. How can attendees find you at the show? Does your booth have a theme? How many folks are you sending?
Bradley: Next will have a team of senior leaders, product management, and data protection experts at booth #2408. We look forward to conversations with security leaders, practitioners, and champions to help them solve complex problems around data loss prevention and insider risk management.
In addition to our booth presence, our CSO will be on hand to deliver a session entitled Insider Risk Management and DLP – Double down and beat the house. It’s happening Wednesday, August 9 | 5:20 – 5:40 PM in Mandalay Bay L.
VMblog: Is this your first time sponsoring Black Hat? If not, how many times have you sponsored before? And, what keeps you coming back?
Bradley: This is the 1st year that Next sponsored Black Hat, we’re looking forward to making a great 1st impression on the attendees. Black Hat is one of the premier events for information security professionals and we’re excited for all the Black Hat attendees to see a new face delivering solutions to data protection challenges.
VMblog: What is your message to Black Hat attendees coming out to the show this year?
Bradley: A big question to answer, given the many reasons why people come to Black Hat each year, but here is the Next take. There are many reasons to attend Black Hat, and the best way to ensure it is a productive use of your time is to go in with a plan. If you are attending to gain cybersecurity knowledge at one of the many sessions, get the agenda and prioritize your sessions. These sessions can be a great way to network and meet like-minded people, the 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after a session can often be as valuable if not more so than the sessions themselves. In the session, you’re exposed to research and insights from some of the industries greatest. And, since you are in the room with them, you can get an intro, ask some more questions, and make the connection.
Lastly, we at Next hope you spend time walking the trade show floor and stop by our booth, #2408. We’ll be giving a brief presentation several times an hour to show you what Reveal can do, then we invite you to take a more detailed look at the platform with one of our engineers. You can ask them about your data protection challenges. We’re confident our insider risk management and DLP platform can help you solve data protection challenges current solutions can’t.
VMblog: The show is focused on cybersecurity. What specific problems is your company and technology addressing?
Bradley: Next is a provider of insider risk and data protection solutions. Next is disrupting the legacy data loss prevention market with a user-centric, flexible, cloud-native, AI/ML-powered solution built for today’s threat landscape. The Reveal platform is built upon a high performance agent and a cloud-native, SaaS, multi-tenant platform.
Next is an innovative and experienced partner that helps our customers achieve their data protection goals. We deliver this via a managed data protection program where we become part of your security team, or a cloud-based platform where your team runs it.
VMblog: What are some of the key takeaways of your solution that Black Hat attendees should be aware of?
Bradley: The Reveal platform prioritizes and risk scores insider risk detections and DLP events into correlated data sets for rapid assessment of the highest risk activity. Analysts can easily pivot into detailed entity specific activity timelines diving into specific areas of interest for more detail. All events are viewable in a single unified RBAC controlled triage and investigation workbench UI, there is no toggling between multiple platforms to view insider risk or DLP events and detections.
- Flexible Platform – We designed Reveal for the modern technology stack, user, and threat space. Reveal is cloud native with smart agents that interact with the OS and browser. Agents can be quickly deployed and deliver policy-free, immediate visibility to user behavior and risk, and rapid time to value.
- Balancing Privacy and Security – Scoped Investigations ensures that only authorized individuals have access to conduct investigations when authorized by scoped investigations and that their access is time-bound, revocable, and audited.
- Real time on-agent content inspection – Reveal analyzes data when it is in active use and makes data protection decisions when sensitive data is at its greatest risk. Content inspection is not dependent on internet access.
- Policy-free user activity visibility – the Reveal agent can be deployed without a policy, to watch and document activity including file, process, network, browser, email (outbound), print and removable media activity. This data set and insights can be used to identify data exposure risks (e.g. SaaS app usage), implement policies, and assess policy efficacy.
- Machine learning on the endpoint – Reveal uniquely leverages ML models on the endpoint to baseline and identify changes in behavior at the user level to flag and provide context around observed high risk activity focused on sensitive data and IP. This distributed compute model has a lower operational cost for customers and can provide unique insights into tens of thousands of user and endpoint entities.
- User training at the point of risk – Reveal provides user guidance, coaching, and education in real time to re-enforce security policies and direct employees to authorized workflows for collaborating securely on high value data.
- Adaptive controls – Reveal lets you decide how to respond to any detected endpoint action that puts data at risk. From auditing to active blocking, coaching, isolation and forensics data and screenshot capture you are in control.
- Watchlist management via API and directory integration – customers can create and manage multiple watchlists to focus investigations on high-risk entity groups e.g. leavers and privileged users.
- APIs for all management functionality – full Swagger API documentation is provided for all functionality supported by the management console enabling customization of the system and workflow integration by customers or MSP partners.
VMblog: The market is a crowded space. What is it about your company and technology that sets you apart from the competition? What are your differentiators?
Bradley: Next is uniquely positioned as both an insider risk management and data loss prevention solution. The Reveal platform, by Next, allows our customers to take a data and user behavior centric approach to data protection. Addressing both regulatory compliance use cases focused on protecting sensitive data and the detection, response and investigation of deliberate data theft and insider threat use cases with one license and one user interface. Unlike legacy solutions, Reveal is a flexible, cloud-native, ML powered solution built for today’s threat landscape.
Next differentiates from the DLP market with the following:
- Real time content and context inspection identifies and protects data on the fly. There is no need for the complex, time consuming, and mistake riddled data discovery and data classification. With Reveal, you can see and protect data as soon as you install the agent.
- Policy free visibility provides immediate value and complements traditional policies. Our agent delivers instant visibility into how users are interacting with data from day one. You can use these to build policies that reflect reality, but also to ensure data protection stays relevant with business changes. Policies only see what they are told yo look for, a policy free approach lets you see changes in data movement and discover risks policies never will.
- Machine learning on the endpoint identifies typical vs. anomalous behavior. We’re the only DLP and IRM solution with ML on the endpoint. It means our models learn faster and are more accurate that those that rely on platform-based machine learning.
- User training at the point of risk to support security education when your data is most vulnerable. Our customizable prompts enable security teams to reinforce acceptable use policies and redirect employees to sanctioned options for sharing sensitive data.
- Adaptive controls that let you decide what actions to take, from logging to blocking. DLP is known for binary block/allow that frustrates users and security teams. Reveal gives the power to the business to decide how to response to risky insider behavior or DLP alerts.
VMblog: What will you be showing off at the show this year?
Bradley: The Reveal platform, our unified insider risk management and data loss prevention platform will be the highlight of the Next booth. We’ll be delivering a brief presentation several times per hour where attendees can learn about Reveal (and get a chance to win $100) and how we can simplify your data protection challenges. Next’s mission is to reinvent data protection for today’s modern organization. It is disrupting the legacy data loss prevention market with a user-centric, flexible, cloud-native, AI/ML-powered solution built for today’s threat landscape. Our customers get immediate value from our platform for data loss prevention, insider risk mitigation, real time user education, and adaptive controls needed to enable effective data security programs.
VMblog: If you were presenting on the keynote stage, what trends do you see that companies should be paying special attention to in 2023 and beyond?
Bradley: Balancing privacy and security – Employees have expectations of privacy; employers have liability concerns; and privacy and labor laws are non-negotiable. Information security teams must balance the expectation of employee privacy with the need to provide appropriate data protection controls. Insider risk solutions need to provide the detail required to properly triage and resolve an insider risk detection, and respond to a business request for investigation, without exposing sensitive information unless legitimate interest is established and access to user activity authorized and audited.
VMblog: Does your company have any speaking slots at Black Hat? If so, can you tell us more about those sessions so people can get them on their schedules?
Bradley: Our CSO will be on hand to deliver a session entitled Insider Risk Management and DLP – Double down and beat the house. It’s happening Wednesday, August 9 | 5:20 – 5:40 PM in Mandalay Bay L. The premise is that organizations need both an insider risk management solution and a data loss prevention solution, why not get them from one vendor who understands how to let each solution make a better overall platform. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) historically promised security, but left businesses deeply frustrated and no better off than before. Insider Risk Management (IRM) historically delivered insight but lacked any enforcement and came across as a little creepy.
In the session, you’ll learn:
- Why DLP and IRM are converging and how that benefits security teams
- How to use the insights from IRM to sharpen and focus the visibility and control from DLP to build an effective security program
- Ways to preserve user privacy without sacrificing incident response effectiveness.
We’ll show you that you can make DLP and IRM live up to what was promised!
VMblog: Is your company giving away any interesting tchotchke at your booth? What is it?
Bradley: We have a great giveway for the pentester and security guru, a Flipper Zero multi-tool. Flipper Zero is a tiny piece of hardware with a curious personality of a cyber-dolphin. It can interact with digital systems in real life and grow while you use it. Explore any kind of access control system, RFID, radio protocols, and debug hardware using GPIO pins.
We’re giving several of them away at the booth during Black Hat. Like the Next LinkedIn page and tag us in your post about something you learned at our booth #2408 using #NextBH23 and you’ll automatically be entered in to win a Flipper Zero.
##
