Are you getting ready for the upcoming Black Hat USA 2024 event, an internationally recognized cybersecurity event providing the most technical and relevant information security research, now in its 27th year.  The event is quickly approaching, taking place August 3-8, 2024, 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 Haggai Polak, Chief Product Officer, Securonix, a market leader in AI-Reinforced CyberOps.  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?

Haggai Polak:  Securonix is a five-time leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM and an industry leader in AI-Reinforced Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response. The company is pushing forward in its mission to secure its customers, staying ahead of cyber threats by reinforcing all layers of its platform with AI capabilities. Securonix Unified Defense SIEM provides organizations with the first and only AI-Reinforced solution built with a cybersecurity mesh architecture on a highly scalable data cloud. The innovative cloud-delivered solution ensures a frictionless CyberOps experience and enables organizations to scale up their security operations while keeping up with evolving threats.

VMblog:  Black Hat is known for its energetic and interactive booths. What unique experiences or demonstrations do you have planned to engage attendees at your booth? What will you be showing off at the show this year?

Polak:  Recognizing the immense pressure security analysts face in today's complex threat landscape, we are excited to reintroduce our popular punching bag activity at our Black Hat booth. This engaging activity allows analysts to knock out their stress while tackling AI-powered attacks. Additionally, our live leaderboard is back, enabling participants to compete for the highest score! We invite everyone to visit our booth and discover how Securonix EON delivers knockout power against cyberattacks. After completing their punching session, visitors are invited to hear about the latest analyst efficiency innovations delivered by Securonix - Noise Canceling SIEM and Cyber Data Fabric.

VMblog:  Black Hat attendees are known for being security professionals at the forefront of the industry. What specific challenges do you anticipate they'll be facing, and how will your solutions help them overcome those challenges?

Polak:  The escalation of AI-powered attacks and adversaries is challenging organizations that already face the hurdles of ever-expanding attack surfaces, new regulatory and compliance pressures, and resource constraints. Securonix unveiled Securonix EON, a groundbreaking suite of AI-Reinforced capabilities, to respond to these challenges by using Amazon Bedrock to provide a powerful, unified analyst experience with advanced AI capabilities.

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

Polak:  The Securonix Unified Defense SIEM platform recently underwent a major update in the form of Securonix EON to reinforce all layers of its industry leading SIEM with AI. Securonix EON was designed specifically for customers to leverage AI to protect themselves against a threat landscape that features an increasing number of AI-powered attacks. Securonix plans to continue to roll out new features for the Unified Defense SIEM platform over the course of 2024. 

During RSAC we announced the following AI-Reinforced capabilities:

• Insider Threat Psycholinguistics, which utilizes the science of deciphering psychology from language powered by Amazon Bedrock and provides entity and activity-based risk scoring to uplevel insider threat hunting capabilities.

• Adaptive Threat Modeling, which leverages machine learning to develop adaptive threat models and dynamic threat chaining of violations with anomaly detection, enabling analysts and CyberOps teams to identify never-before-seen attack chains in near real-time

• InvestigateRX, which converts retrieved targeted and objective content into a coherent and context-aware summary to empower analysts to make swift decisions and save approximately 15 minutes per incident.

VMblog:  Is your company launching anything new at the show?  Without giving too much away, can you give us a sneak peek?

Polak:  Yes, we are announcing two new features within the groundbreaking Securonix EON suite of AI-Reinforced capabilities, which the team is very excited about. These include:

• Cyber Data Fabric, which gives organizations complete control in orchestrating their data for ingestion, analysis and storage to meet their security and compliance needs.

• Noise Canceling SIEM, which dramatically reduces alert fatigue by intelligently suppressing up to 50% of total alert volume, allowing security analysts to focus on critical threats.

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?

Polak:  Recently named a leader for the fifth consecutive time in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Securonix has an unparalleled history of innovation and develops and deploys solutions that empower CyberOps teams to detect and respond to threats with 10 times the speed, precision, and efficacy. The company pioneered User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) with an analytics-centric approach to security monitoring and was the first to market with a cloud-native next-gen SIEM.

Securonix again disrupted the global SIEM market in 2023 when it officially announced the launch of the industry's first Unified Defense SIEM. The Securonix Unified Defense SIEM platform offers category-leading features that protect against insider threats and other emerging security challenges. Unified Defense SIEM is the only solution that provides enterprise organizations with 365 days of 'Hot' data, category-leading integration of generative AI technology, and a seamless TDIR experience, all in a single platform. Built on top of Snowflake's data lake, the cloud-native platform accommodates massive volumes of security-relevant data in a single, unified viewpoint.

Securonix EON's newly introduced AI-Reinforced capabilities are powered by Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic AI Claude to give partners and customers the most advanced enterprise-grade generative AI technology that exists. It utilizes this cutting-edge technology to make life easier for security teams, ​reducing false positives, making detection more resilient, and reducing the need to develop threat-specific content​​. ​The unique behavior analytics capabilities provided by Securonix are perfectly aligned to insider threat use cases, where approaches based on threat indicators or known threat behavior are not effective.​​

​​​Our customers have reported clear improvements to their insider threat programs due to the adoption of insider threat psycholinguistics - and adaptive Threat Modeling has been identifying new threats to customers without impact from false positives and with no need to wait for the development or tuning of new detection content.​​

VMblog:  Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of cybersecurity, and how do you see your company playing a role in shaping it?

Polak:  Groundbreaking innovations and expanding applications of emerging technology are truly changing our world - and we all have a front-row seat seeing what AI can do for our personal lives and businesses. For over a decade, Securonix has been at the forefront of AI-driven security. Our pioneering work in UEBA technology, AI-Reinforced SIEM and continuous innovation underpins our solutions. As the industry's largest independent SIEM provider, we are uniquely positioned to usher in the new era of AI-Reinforced CyberOps.

The April 2024 launch of Securonix EON plays a major role in helping organizations keep up with the AI race against adversaries, as it provides customers with a comprehensive strategy to combat cyber threats and detect and defend against adversaries with greater speed, precision, and efficacy than ever before. Threat actors are continuously evolving, and it is our responsibility to help our customers stay ahead of the escalating threat curve. We believe our AI-Reinforced platform is more than a solution, but rather the cornerstone of a comprehensive strategy to stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.

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