RSA Conference 2015 is in the books and what a busy week it was. As one of the largest security conferences in the world, we were jam-packed with activity giving presentations and meeting with conference attendees.
This year’s RSA discussions really validated the work we do at Fortscale to bring more visibility into user behavior to companies. RSA President Amit Yoran delivered a keynote presentation entitled “Escaping Security’s Dark Ages,” and really hammered home the importance of gaining visibility into everything happening within your network. He spoke to the importance of knowing your users, your adversaries, your priorities and your weaknesses and how visibility helps to achieve this. Cyber security is shifting more and more towards a user-centric approach by leveraging on existing data and providing more visibility and more actionable insights. We feel that the focus around gaining visibility, knowing the users and using this information to better inform and prioritize our actions can actually move the needle with how organizations are mitigating insider threats.
Speaking with conference attendees in our Fortscale booth, we found a growing awareness surrounding Insider Threats and the need for visibility to help detect malicious activity. Our booth was bustling, as attendees were eager to learn more about our solution. Well, we definitely had other incentives to our booth visitors: a Fortscale logo built of Lego blocks!
Further validation of our vision was the inclusion of Fortscale in the annual RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox contest. We were one of ten security companies chosen out of a pool of almost 100 to showcase our User Behavior Analytics solution. It was also especially meaningful as Fortscale was the only security analytics company chosen to participate.
Our CEO, Idan Tendler, gave a 3-minute presentation and took part in a Q&A with a panel of judges that included Gerhard Eschelbeck (VP Security Engineering, Google), Asheem Chandra (Partner, Greylock), among others. You can watch Idan’s presentation here. After a round of presentations, the 10 participating companies held a booth to address more specific questions and demonstrate the technology. While Fortscale did not ultimately win the competition, we were well received and our inclusion as a finalist emphasized how security analytics is becoming a more substantial trend in the industry.
Capping off our week at RSA was the presentation of a 2015 Cyber Defense Award for “Most Innovative Security Solution.” The annual awards from Cyber Defense Magazine, the industry’s leading electronic information security magazine, honor
businesses for their innovation in the field of Information Security. A panel of leading independent information security experts selected Fortscale’s solution for the prize after conducting an extensive review and judging process.
Many innovative solutions were introduced at RSA. One striking trend simply reiterated the importance of visibility. It’s not just about understanding who logs into the network, but also getting the visibility into what users are doing once logged in. While machine learning, artificial intelligence and sophisticated algorithms help, it’s also important to keep security simple, solving the most fundamental pain points for security analysts by taking a different path than was tried before. Fortscale has worked on these problems since our inception, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this trend. We will continue to innovate and evolve our solution over the next year and look forward to sharing our results at RSA 2016.