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 Dan Benjamin, Co-Founder and CEO of Dig Security, a cloud data security leader. Make sure to add them to your MUST SEE list.
VMblog: Before we get into it, can you give us a quick overview of the company? What should folks know?
Dan Benjamin: The Dig Data Security Platform is defining the landscape of the future of data security through its advanced data protection technology, which uses data security posture management (DSPM) and the industry’s first and only real-time data detection and response (DDR) capabilities with cloud data loss prevention (DLP) to deliver comprehensive visibility, control, and real-time protection of data assets across any cloud and cloud data store.
With our latest product advancements, Dig is now the first DSPM solution to provide Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities for image classification, and to provide data security for generative AI deployments.
VMblog: You are sponsoring the upcoming Black Hat USA event. How can attendees find you at the show? Does your booth have a theme?
Benjamin: My team and I will be located at Booth #579. We would love attendees to stop by our booth for a demo and to see the latest enhancements to our industry-leading data security platform. I will be joined by Anthony Seto, Dig’s Field CTO; Michael Trites, our SVP of global sales; and a few product managers and engineers from our stellar team.
We will demo the Dig Data Security Platform, spotlighting our new capabilities, including:
● Support for OCR, enabling users to detect sensitive data in image files
● Capabilities to secure Large Language Model (LLM) architectures so customers can now train and deploy LLMs while upholding data security, privacy, and compliance
Additionally, we will walk attendees through our work with Tipalti, a leading global payables solution, and how we helped their CISO and security team secure and protect sensitive customer data.
VMblog: The show is focused on cybersecurity. What specific problems is your company and technology addressing? What are some of the key takeaways of your solution that Black Hat attendees should be aware of?
Benjamin: Organizations are experiencing an explosion of data on their public cloud environments. With enterprises shifting to complex environments with dozens of database types across clouds, monitoring and detecting data exfiltration and policy violations has become a complex problem. At Dig, we’ve developed a public cloud data security solution that fits the speed of innovation in the cloud and the complex threat models it introduced, solving problems like time to detect and respond to an incident, shadow data, and addressing the growing attack vector.
- Dig enables enterprises to reduce the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the mean time to respond (MTTR) to data attacks by 90%. According to IBM, the average time to identify and contain a data breach is 277 days (in 2022). Dig helps reduce this time to under 15 minutes through real-time data detection and response (DDR) capabilities. DDR is based on monitoring all data interactions in real time and allowing security teams to respond to attacks and misuse of sensitive data quickly.
- Dig allows users to identify shadow data that contains sensitive information. Shadow data is not actively managed or governed by IT teams and poses a significant risk from both security and compliance perspectives.
- Dig helps customers reduce the data attack vector by highlighting and prioritizing data misconfigurations and risks that could lead to ransomware. This is critical, as 11% of security breaches studied by IBM in 2022 were ransomware attacks.
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?
Benjamin: Dig provides the only solution in the market that offers both DSPM and DDR capabilities that together provide data risk visibility in real time to help organizations locate, classify, and prioritize data risk in multiple public cloud environments. Unlike other cloud security providers, Dig uses a comprehensive threat model for cloud data attacks that detects, analyzes and instantly responds to cloud data threats to minimize business impact and damage with an average mean-time-to-detection (MTTD) of less than a minute.
We continue to innovate further than any other company in the data security industry. We recently added support for OCR to the Dig Data Security Platform. Dig can now detect sensitive customer data in image files, such as passports and driver’s licenses, that are stored in multi-cloud environments. OCR capabilities are critical as enterprises increasingly collect and store data in image files, and unless they can map all the sensitive data, it remains open to mass exposure. We just announced new capabilities to secure Large Language Model (LLM) architectures as well. Our customers can now train and deploy LLMs while upholding data security, privacy, and compliance, maintaining visibility and control over the data being passed to relevant AI models, and preventing inadvertent data exposure during model training or deployment.
We are also dedicated to pursuing strategic partnerships with industry-leading companies to develop, grow, and innovate our platform. We recently partnered with CrowdStrike to bring malware detection analysis to cloud data stores, bringing customers comprehensive data asset visibility and security across all enterprise cloud stacks and preventing risks that could threaten business processes and operations.
VMblog: What are some of the top priorities you believe attendees at Black Hat should be considering for 2023/2024?
Benjamin: Black Hat attendees, and the security community at large, should:
- Prioritize achieving compliance with new data privacy regulations (shadow IT/data, exposures of sensitive data, data access governance) without slowing down business or interfering with existing processes
- Deploy new technologies to help reduce the data attack surface and better respond to ransomware attacks
- Protect existing and new data pipelines to avoid breaches and cyberattacks
VMblog: What are some of the security best practices you would deem critical?
Benjamin: It is critical to take a holistic approach to cloud data security. In practice, this means no longer relying on discovery and classification of text files alone-enterprises need OCR capabilities. With the wide adoption of digital IDs, sensitive data is stored in digital formats now more than ever. Enterprises cannot rely on discovery and classification of text files alone, as there is an overwhelming amount of sensitive data in image files. Moreover, the acceleration of digital transformation during the Covid-19 pandemic has created a massive number of scanned documents in public cloud environments that cannot be ignored. Data left unprotected and unmonitored increases the risk of data exfiltration and breaches.
It is also important to continue innovating and keeping up with the latest tech advancements, but to do so securely. This means upholding data security while experimenting with training and deploying generative AI.
VMblog: As a show sponsor, do you have any tips for attendees to better prepare for the conference?
Benjamin: I would advise attendees to think about the solutions they want to explore before they arrive at the show. Since Black Hat is such a large and widely-attended event, it’s important to focus on what’s most relevant to you and your organization to get the most value out of attending.
##
