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 Patrick Gardner, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Flashpoint, a globally trusted leader in risk intelligence.  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?

Patrick Gardner: Flashpoint is a data and intelligence company that empowers our customers to take rapid, decisive action to stop threats and reduce risk. We do that by delivering personalized intelligence to multiple intelligence and security teams, with a particular focus on serving Cyber Threat Intelligence, Vulnerability Management, Corporate or Physical Security, and National Security teams. 

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?

Gardner: Flashpoint's booth is #2752. Our booth's theme is a campfire (come for s'mores!), which is symbolic of our approach to building close, collaborative, supportive, long-lasting relationships with our customers. Like a crowd around a campfire, we unify around a shared mission: to protect. Come by the booth, the fire's warm. We also have a meeting suite available (but without the s'mores). 

VMblog: Is this your first time sponsoring Black Hat?  If not, how many times have you sponsored before?  And, what keeps you coming back?

Gardner: We have been a Black Hat sponsor before, and they put on a great show. But most importantly we come to support our clients, learn from our colleagues and other security and intelligence experts, and bring back what we learn and have it inform our approach-enabling us to remain at the forefront of our industry.

VMblog: What is your message to Black Hat attendees coming out to the show this year?

Gardner: Come to the show knowing what your most pressing security and intelligence challenges are. What would help you better secure your company? What keeps you up at night? What will enable you to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow, i.e. your long-term plan? You will be in the company of other practitioners who share similar missions and challenges that can share their experience and guidance with you to accomplish your goals.

VMblog: The show is focused on cybersecurity.  What specific problems is your company and technology addressing?

Gardner: It starts with our mission: to help our customers protect what they value most by enabling them to take rapid, decisive action to stop threats and reduce risk holistically. We help our customers protect their assets, people, infrastructure, stakeholders, and executives from a wide variety of cyber threats by providing timely and actionable intelligence.

Top of mind for many of our clients right now is ransomware and cyber/data extortion (Clop in particular), the umbrella of executive protection, the potential impact of Generative AI, and how to make sure they are efficient and getting the ROI from all their security investments..

VMblog: What are some of the key takeaways of your solution that Black Hat attendees should be aware of?

Gardner: Our new Ignite platform is better equipped to tackle the challenges our customers face. With Ignite, we are seeing customers realize additional value with the improved speed, views, and ease of use combined with powerful capabilities needed for complex investigations. We do this by providing dependable intelligence for everyone-helping security teams cut through the noise, find the answers they need to do their jobs faster, and close the gap between data, intelligence, and action. Whether it is a highly experienced analyst deep in investigative work or a new junior analyst consuming reports to stay on top of trends, they can stay ahead of the changing threat landscape and fulfill their mission.

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?

Gardner: Here are five pillars of Flashpoint differentiation:

1. Speed and scale of collections: We stay ahead of adversaries by evolving quickly with the rapidly-moving threat landscape, and collecting data at scale from those areas of the internet that matter the most. We do this through the heavy application of technology and automation to all our analysts' work.


2. Quality of data: While the competition is focused on quantity of data, we specialize in quantity and quality. Whether you need visibility into the deep and dark web, OSINT/surface web, vulnerabilities, breach data, or physical security intelligence, we strive to deliver the right data for our customers, cut through the noise, and provide teams with the most impactful and important intelligence relevant to their missions.


3. Virtual Operations: Our virtual operations expertise enables us to enter online communities that others cannot, and deliver tailored results that are most impactful to our customers. We supplement this with our Managed Attribution offering that gives our customers the freedom they require to safely collect critical data with a quick and easy to use solution that includes all operational security needed.


4. Ease of action: Powered by machine learning models, Flashpoint delivers enriched and contextualized insights that help customers prioritize and filter relevant data, attain additional context, and action the intelligence provided. Flashpoint delivers the fastest time-to-value in the market.


5. Team: Flashpoint is unwaveringly committed to our customers' success. We view our customer relationships as true partnerships, and we will work collaboratively and tirelessly to support their mission through all our products, services, and support.. 
   

VMblog: What will you be showing off at the show this year?

Gardner: Building off of what we announced at RSA-which is the release of our new Flashpoint Ignite platform-we will continue to showcase how we're helping CTI, Vuln, Physical Security, and NatSec teams leverage our team-tailored intelligence in one workspace with a holistic view of risk. We'll continue to show our new video search/OCR and ransomware dashboards experiences, as well as new innovations, including our fast, intuitive, and easy to use reimagined UI, threat actor profiles, and a few other surprises.

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?

Gardner: With our customers and even the market as a whole, we're seeing just how extensively cyber threats are overlapping, intersecting, and relating. These threats-from the online spaces in which cybercriminals operate to the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) they use to execute their attacks-are cyclical. Organizations cannot afford to view, prepare for, mitigate, and prevent these threats in silos. Multiple disjointed feeds and solutions make identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating persistent and evolving threats difficult and costly. This is exactly why we built our new Ignite platform: to unify and rally security and intelligence teams behind a single source of truth that integrates workflows between their CTI, Vulnerability Management (VM), Physical Security, and National Security teams. With Ignite, our customers can achieve more with one platform and connect, collaborate, and remediate risk faster with timely and active intelligence in one holistic workspace.

VMblog: Is your company giving away any interesting tchotchke at your booth?  What is it?

Gardner: We are giving away yo-yo's and s'mores, and more!

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