for those of you growing increasingly concerned about the
Speaker:security of your it infrastructure.
Speaker:This episode talks about the concept of an MSSP managed security service provider.
Speaker:Uh, I think you're really going to like what we talk about.
W. Curtis Preston:Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it all podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm your host w Curtis Preston, a k a, Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup.
W. Curtis Preston:And I have with me the guy who I've finally experienced what his dog
W. Curtis Preston:is named after Prasanna Malaiyandi
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:What's going on, Curtis?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:I know,
W. Curtis Preston:you
W. Curtis Preston:you really weren't sure
W. Curtis Preston:where I, what I was
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so I thought you were going to go for like your stair
Prasanna Malaiyandi:consultant or something like that, but No, I think that's a good thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So,
W. Curtis Preston:no.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I got to experience, uh, Kulfi.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Indian Ice Cream
W. Curtis Preston:um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:That was quite, uh, cuz we went to this new, uh, place.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and, and I, and I shouldn't, should I say Indian food or
W. Curtis Preston:should I say Himalayan food or?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, cuz it was the taste of the Himalayas,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It could be, well, it could be like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Indian or Nepalese, typically.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Those are,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Nip Nepalese.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but they
W. Curtis Preston:had, but they had, Vindaloo.
W. Curtis Preston:Although, um, it, it was funny, I, you know, I went, I think I
W. Curtis Preston:told you I went once and I I got a seven outta 10 and it was like, as
W. Curtis Preston:well have been ice cream as far as
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you like really spicy Curtis?
W. Curtis Preston:standpoint.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I said to the, I went back to the waitress.
W. Curtis Preston:So we literally went just a couple days later
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, you went back.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I didn't know this.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:We went back and I said, I said, you know, I had a seven the other day and it
W. Curtis Preston:was nothing like, I need more than that.
W. Curtis Preston:And she's like, she looked at me
W. Curtis Preston:like, you can have an eight.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, like I was, because I was gonna go for the 10.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm like, if that's a seven, I'm gonna go for the 10.
W. Curtis Preston:She's like, I'll let you have an eight, you know, and I was like, you know what?
W. Curtis Preston:You're not in charge of me.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And how was he.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but I had a eight.
W. Curtis Preston:It, it was definitely, it had more bite to it than the seven.
W. Curtis Preston:But I don't know, I've had like authentic Indian vindaloo with,
W. Curtis Preston:with authentic Indian spices.
W. Curtis Preston:This doesn't taste like that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:well, I, I, I wanna say that each region
Prasanna Malaiyandi:probably does their spices slightly differently based
Prasanna Malaiyandi:on what they have access to.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, there's that, this is why I asked you
W. Curtis Preston:the question about whether or not it's cheating just to throw in a
W. Curtis Preston:little cayenne.
W. Curtis Preston:And it sounds like it is.
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz I
W. Curtis Preston:tasted cayenne.
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, I, I'm pretty sure they put cayenne in just
W. Curtis Preston:to make it a little hotter.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But then you ended with dessert, which
W. Curtis Preston:you know
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the mango.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh right.
W. Curtis Preston:Which we, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:And the mango Kulfi.
W. Curtis Preston:And I was like, Kulfi, I know . I finally got to see what
W. Curtis Preston:Kulfi
Prasanna Malaiyandi:he was named Kulfi because when we were adopting
Prasanna Malaiyandi:him, uh, we called up my sister.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And she was really hungry that day and so on.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Her mind was food, so she started naming off Indian Foods like Chutney and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sambar and Mixture and Jalabi and kulfi.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so my wife and I, we decided kulfi was an awesome name and it works well for 'em.
W. Curtis Preston:That's funny.
W. Curtis Preston:That's funny.
W. Curtis Preston:I know.
W. Curtis Preston:He's, he's been on the
W. Curtis Preston:podcast a few times.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, mainly just sort of barking and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yes, a couple times.
W. Curtis Preston:wanting
W. Curtis Preston:wanting to be on your lap, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Well our guest has 25 years of experience working in the
W. Curtis Preston:networking, telecommunications, and information security space.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, he is currently serving as a c e O of Solcyber managed security services.
W. Curtis Preston:We're excited to have him on the pod.
W. Curtis Preston:Welcome to the podcast, Scott McCrady.
Scott McCrady:Thank you Curtis Prasanna.
Scott McCrady:Very nice to meet both of you.
Scott McCrady:Um, I actually, I was just to pivot off your food conversation.
Scott McCrady:I actually spent a year in Thailand when I was younger.
Scott McCrady:I was a volunteer English teacher, and uh, I remember my very first meal there.
Scott McCrady:I, I thought I was used to hot food.
Scott McCrady:I, I grew up in Dallas, so you know, jalapenos and stuff.
Scott McCrady:And so they asked, do you want it hot, medium, or mild?
Scott McCrady:And I thought, you know, I'll be safe.
Scott McCrady:I'll have, I'll, I'll get medium.
Scott McCrady:Uh, it was, um, I don't know if you've ever gotten the
Scott McCrady:hiccups from having food too
Scott McCrady:hot, but I immediately, you know, two or three bites into it.
Scott McCrady:I'm sweating profusely.
Scott McCrady:And then just out of the blue, you just get this, these hiccups that
Scott McCrady:for like two or three minutes.
Scott McCrady:And, and that's when I realized that, uh, Thai hot food is a different level of hot
Scott McCrady:food than what I'd, uh, what I'd gotten used
W. Curtis Preston:I've been, I've been to, uh, Phuket and I just remember I
W. Curtis Preston:was, I was hanging out with a local and I asked them to order two dishes.
W. Curtis Preston:One that they felt was, you know, for the wimpy American, but still spicy.
W. Curtis Preston:And one that they would eat.
W. Curtis Preston:And I would try the one that they would eat.
W. Curtis Preston:And if I couldn't eat it, then we would swap dishes.
W. Curtis Preston:And I just touched the tongue, touched the spoon to my tongue, and I, my head
W. Curtis Preston:blew off and I was like, swap, swap, swap.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I can't, I can't do it.
W. Curtis Preston:I can't do it.
Scott McCrady:Un for, for, for, for my palate.
Scott McCrady:Uh, the sticky rice and mango as a dessert was amazing.
Scott McCrady:I could live, um, chicken fried rice, uh, with a beer was about
Scott McCrady:as good as you're ever gonna.
Scott McCrady:And I love their stir fries and their curries, but I generally had to tell
Scott McCrady:'em to, to take it down a notch.
Scott McCrady:Um, cuz I could, I could eat decently spicy food I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's a different level sometime.
Scott McCrady:it is just a different, it, it's a different level.
Scott McCrady:It is a
Scott McCrady:different level.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Scott McCrady:Delicious.
Scott McCrady:By the way, I never, never b been to a Thai restaurant in America that's been
Scott McCrady:able to recreate that unique flavor.
W. Curtis Preston:no, that's the problem.
W. Curtis Preston:This is why no one should travel, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so so, uh, because, you know, you live in, you live in Texas . I
W. Curtis Preston:live in San Diego, I can get decent, uh, Texas style barbecue here.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, but it's not that, it's not what you can get there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I will definitely tell you, no one here knows what
W. Curtis Preston:a beef rib looks like, right?
W. Curtis Preston:An actual Texas beef
W. Curtis Preston:rib.
W. Curtis Preston:It's, it's two and a half pounds, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It's one rib, it's two and a half pounds.
W. Curtis Preston:And,
Scott McCrady:deliciousness, of sweet, sweet deliciousness
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, uh, yeah, you know, we've already, we talked before the recording that
W. Curtis Preston:you know, that I did this, this barbecue road trip with my wife,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, there, just right when Covid was starting to die down just a little bit.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and we did this little road trip and, uh, made a little YouTube
W. Curtis Preston:video of each stop and, um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:But, but this is the problem.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, I, like I've been in New Orleans, I've had, , Cajun food in New Orleans.
W. Curtis Preston:It nowhere is as good as
W. Curtis Preston:it is there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, Indian food in India.
W. Curtis Preston:I've had Indian food in India, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and made one big mistake there.
W. Curtis Preston:I was at a, I was at a buffet and I managed to put, um, a big scoop of chutney
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your problem.
W. Curtis Preston:based on thinking it was, I thought it was a man.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, so I put a big scoop, big scoop of it in my mouth that, ah,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, didn't burn my mouth off.
W. Curtis Preston:It's just, it's a really strong flavor.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:It's, it's something you're supposed to dab on.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Not eat as a main meal.
W. Curtis Preston:That's both the joy and the, uh, like if you ever get
W. Curtis Preston:a chance to go to, uh, uh, Holland, their, um, their food there, the, the,
W. Curtis Preston:the Thai, the, uh, Indonesian food.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, uh, the, the, the rice, the rice dishes.
W. Curtis Preston:Those are really good.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
W. Curtis Preston:looks like we've lost our
Prasanna Malaiyandi:just went to go look after his pup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:how
W. Curtis Preston:how
Scott McCrady:the, I told you guys this was gonna happen.
Scott McCrady:He literally has been perfect today,
Scott McCrady:and now he just threw his his bone underneath the couch.
Scott McCrady:which of course he can't get to it cuz he doesn't have opposable thumbs.
Scott McCrady:And uh, the only time he tends to freak out is if he,
Scott McCrady:if his one of his toys or his
Scott McCrady:bone gets underneath something and then he'll,
Scott McCrady:you know,
Scott McCrady:call
W. Curtis Preston:you said he's, he's six, six months old,
Scott McCrady:Eight
Scott McCrady:months
Prasanna Malaiyandi:get him as a
Scott McCrady:Eight months old.
Scott McCrady:His name I did, he is, uh, I, I traveled all my whole life and so
Scott McCrady:I haven't had to be able to have a
Scott McCrady:dog for, you know, a long time.
Scott McCrady:So, you know, I was
Scott McCrady:like, I'm gonna get a dog finally.
Scott McCrady:I'm not traveling as much, I'm not going overseas.
Scott McCrady:All this jazz.
Scott McCrady:And oh my goodness, he's a blast.
Scott McCrady:So much fun.
Scott McCrady:Such a sweet boy, good puppy.
Scott McCrady:You know, all dogs are nice, but
Scott McCrady:for me he's easy because he's,
Scott McCrady:he's, he's not too
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's cra it's sort of the luck of the draw, right?
Scott McCrady:That
Scott McCrady:it is.
Scott McCrady:You gotta love him no matter what.
Scott McCrady:Right.
Scott McCrady:But, uh, I did, I did get lucky.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:awesome.
W. Curtis Preston:Good for you.
W. Curtis Preston:So we're, we're gonna talk about, um, you know, one of our favorite
W. Curtis Preston:topics today, which is, uh, security.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I honestly, you know, I can't imagine what it's like
W. Curtis Preston:to manage information security in today's , today's world.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, I was gonna tell you,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:wait before you go.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I finished the book, cuckoos net.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Cuckoos Egg.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, you
W. Curtis Preston:finished the Cuckoos Egg
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sorry, I totally forgot to tell you since,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but we're talking about security now.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So for those who haven't read it, go read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's a really good book.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's, or sorry, cliff Stole.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, it's a really good book.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's from the eighties about, uh, what would you say, an IT
Prasanna Malaiyandi:person trying to find a hacker.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'll leave it at that.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:It's a fascinating story of, he's, he's, uh, a Unix cis admin at Berkeley Uni.
W. Curtis Preston:It's a true story.
W. Curtis Preston:He's a Unix CIS admin at Berkeley University, and they, they had, um,
W. Curtis Preston:this was when the Unix computers, like university Eunice computers with
W. Curtis Preston:Bill for time, and they had both the onboard, like the native time system,
W. Curtis Preston:and they had the, um, and they had a commercial one, and they were, they were
Prasanna Malaiyandi:75 cents.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, that's what, 75 cents.
W. Curtis Preston:And so he just went as a project just because, um, and he ended up, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, un uncovering, uh, hackers.
W. Curtis Preston:And this is before, um, that was
W. Curtis Preston:considered a crime.
W. Curtis Preston:So like he, like he's, he goes to the FBI and FBI's like,
W. Curtis Preston:Well, did they steal anything?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:more than a million dollars?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They're like, no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do they steal classified information?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Nope.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They're like, not our problem.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:It's,
W. Curtis Preston:it is a fascinating story and where it ends up
W. Curtis Preston:is, you know, it, I, I think it just, it
W. Curtis Preston:just gets better and better as
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think
Prasanna Malaiyandi:everyone should read that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:If you're into security and you want to see how it was done,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like in the Hey days, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:In the very, very early days before all of this stuff actually happened.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Read the book
W. Curtis Preston:back when I had brown hair,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Go.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Go read the book.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's
W. Curtis Preston:Scott, have you, have you ever read that book?
Scott McCrady:I haven't, but I, uh, I typed it in while you guys
Scott McCrady:were talking, so it will be, uh,
Scott McCrady:I am a voracious reader, so I
Scott McCrady:will, uh, it is on the list.
W. Curtis Preston:it's, it is, it is a, you know, it's written as a, as a story.
Scott McCrady:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and you know, it's in a day before monitors.
W. Curtis Preston:Like he has a, he has a printer.
W. Curtis Preston:He has a printer that's printing, like he puts in honeypots and, and he's sleeping
W. Curtis Preston:in the data center
W. Curtis Preston:to, to
W. Curtis Preston:listen for the printer
Prasanna Malaiyandi:part is he's an astronomer,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:astronomer by education, right?
Scott McCrady:my education.
Scott McCrady:Yeah.
Scott McCrady:But those were just the days where people just got in and
Scott McCrady:started, you know, doing that.
Scott McCrady:I mean, it's actually not that different than today, but,
Scott McCrady:you know, back then it was pretty, uh,
Scott McCrady:it was all, all
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:recommend reading that book.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:And the reason I brought it up is because we are talking about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:security and it just, uh, hit me.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:I was like, oh, I gotta remember, tell Curtis.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Scott, Scott was like, why are we talking about a book called Cuckoo's Egg?
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Scott McCrady:Well, we've covered barbecue, spicy food, and books,
Scott McCrady:which are three of my favorite things.
Scott McCrady:So
Scott McCrady:I can we call, can we call the podcast a success?
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:We, we could cover beer if you'd like.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I.
W. Curtis Preston:I.
W. Curtis Preston:made beer for a few years, uh, so we could talk about that as well.
W. Curtis Preston:So, I mean, but, but let me, let me ask you this, besides what I see as
W. Curtis Preston:the ever present worry of ransomware,
Scott McCrady:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:what else, uh, are, are today's IT departments worried
W. Curtis Preston:about from a security perspective?
Scott McCrady:Well, ,I think.
Scott McCrady:Um, That's a great question actually.
Scott McCrady:I don't know if I've ever been asked that question because they'll say
Scott McCrady:what, you know, question or what, what keeps people up at night?
Scott McCrady:But outside of ransomware, I think, you know, Curtis, I think if you were
Scott McCrady:to synthesize right this thing down is ransomware is the, uh, threat of the day,
Scott McCrady:or it's the term that everybody knows,
Scott McCrady:but ransomware now is really sort of morphed into lots of different things.
Scott McCrady:And so, um, you get, there's terms like double ransomware,
Scott McCrady:um, there's, uh, obviously the, the information gets, uh, stolen.
Scott McCrady:And so what's happening is just the extortion where, uh, and so what's
Scott McCrady:happened is just the process of people getting into organizations, uh, is causing
Scott McCrady:this ability because of the threat is really sort of morphed into sort of
Scott McCrady:what we call threat as a service or tax as a service, or hacking as a service.
Scott McCrady:You don't have to be the smartest guy in the room to go hack somebody.
Scott McCrady:Now you can literally just point and click there's, there's wind, you know, things
Scott McCrady:that look like Windows applications.
Scott McCrady:You can install a widget.
Scott McCrady:and all of a sudden you can start hacking for almost nothing and not
Scott McCrady:really know what you're doing besides if you can move a mouse around.
Scott McCrady:So the whole threat landscape scape has changed.
Scott McCrady:Ransomware tends to get the notice because there's notifications.
Scott McCrady:Um, for a lot of the larger companies, it's a way of getting payments out.
Scott McCrady:But when you start talking about the overall small medium enterprise, um,
Scott McCrady:and just the massive number of companies that the, the US has specifically, um,
Scott McCrady:once somebody's inside the organization, they've got, uh, the ability to wire.
Scott McCrady:Uh, so wire fraud is huge.
Scott McCrady:Um, they take taking over an account, uh, and do an extortion based on, uh,
Scott McCrady:components that you have in your account.
Scott McCrady:Uh, so there's all these different sort of knock on effects the
Scott McCrady:customers once they're breached.
Scott McCrady:And what,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or I guess you're talking about the knock on effects.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I guess even once they breach one of these, say small medium businesses, they
Prasanna Malaiyandi:could use that also as a launching point to attack other organizations as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Kind of bringing them.
Scott McCrady:You're right on the money.
Scott McCrady:It's called supply chain risk, right?
Scott McCrady:And that supply chain risk, the classic is the H V A C company that,
Scott McCrady:you know, got, was the mechan, was the mechanism to get into target.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and so those, those small, medium organizations can actually be the
Scott McCrady:threat vector into, uh, a, a future
Prasanna Malaiyandi:In fact, a lot of the attacks we've seen right have been.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about the actual organization, more about like a vendor or someone else,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or a third party who had access to a company, which then allowed the attacker.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And like if I go back and think Curtis about like the Okta hack
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right, was a third party right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That had access to Okta.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And that was, wasn't that one Scott, where they didn't necessarily do anything Right.
W. Curtis Preston:They just showed that they got access.
W. Curtis Preston:They showed some screenshots.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you remember the, this one, Scott?
Scott McCrady:I don't know if that one specifically, um, what you do see with
Scott McCrady:a lot of the service providers, um, and you just saw it with last pass, is
Scott McCrady:there's a variety of reasons why, uh, an organization would get, would breach.
Scott McCrady:And so it could be just the consumption of the underlying data.
Scott McCrady:So if it's a nation state, they literally are just building profiles
Scott McCrady:on, you know, people in entities and organizations in the us.
Scott McCrady:Um, so it could just be a theft, uh, it could be ransom, it could be
Scott McCrady:financial, um, or it could be, uh, to leave code behind or leave breaches
Scott McCrady:behind that they can then, um, weaponize at some point in time in the future.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and so as, as an example in the past year, uh, you've seen about plus
Scott McCrady:minus about four times as many zero days in the last 12 months, and you
Scott McCrady:saw in the last four years, And so, um, a lot of those appeared to have
Scott McCrady:already been obviously, uh, they were already, no, no, sorry, not known.
Scott McCrady:They're already created, but they hadn't been used yet because they're
Scott McCrady:being, they were waiting to use those when the time was right.
Scott McCrady:And so you, you see these patterns that emerge based on what's happening
Scott McCrady:around the world, um, what's happening in the economy, uh, or if
Scott McCrady:they're what, uh, organizations or nation states want to accomplish.
Scott McCrady:And, and that's sort of, you see this wave of threat patterns of which ransomware
Scott McCrady:is, is obviously fitting inside of that.
Scott McCrady:Um, but when you look at something like a zero day, you're not usually
Scott McCrady:going to use that on a mid-tier
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's interesting.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I never would've thought like,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of stockpiling your zero days, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And then using it.
Scott McCrady:Oh, for sure.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, but isn't that like if you, so, so what
W. Curtis Preston:you're saying, let me make sure I understand what you're saying.
W. Curtis Preston:So someone develops an exploit that is unknown to anyone but themselves,
W. Curtis Preston:and then they're just sitting there waiting for the right moment to use it.
W. Curtis Preston:Is That
Scott McCrady:That is exactly what I'm saying.
Scott McCrady:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Because I would think that once they get an exploit, they'd
W. Curtis Preston:want to use it right away before anybody finds out about it and patches it and
Scott McCrady:Not, if not, if you're a nation state, Curtis, um, you
Scott McCrady:wanna keep these in your back pocket.
Scott McCrady:Now some of these are against, uh, you gotta remember, and, and there's a lot
Scott McCrady:of different verticals that are targets.
Scott McCrady:You've got, um, infrastructure pipelines as an example.
Scott McCrady:You've got, um, systems that, um, operate iot.
Scott McCrady:So there's a lot of different areas.
Scott McCrady:So when you talk about zero days, we tend to think like
Scott McCrady:zero day on a Windows machine.
Scott McCrady:But the, um, but the, the spectrum of what can have a zero day is
Scott McCrady:actually quite large cuz so many connected machines are out there.
W. Curtis Preston:That's, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, fascinating.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I actually never even, never even
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But I guess the one downside of sort of keeping it in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your back pocket is someone may discover the exploit or the bad code, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And go and patch it before you get it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But like you said, it's like if it's existed around for a while, maybe no one's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:going to notice it, and it's probably a risk that they're willing to take.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Scott McCrady:Yeah, and again, it
Scott McCrady:really is organizational dependent.
Scott McCrady:So if you're, if you are a, uh, threat acting organization that's really designed
Scott McCrady:around making money, you're probably going to use it relatively quickly.
Scott McCrady:Um, get your money.
Scott McCrady:If you are a nation state, uh, targeting infrastructure, then you may hold in
Scott McCrady:your back pocket because it may not be super common to find, uh, that zero
Scott McCrady:day inside a piece of infrastructure.
Scott McCrady:A zero day in windows obviously is, is, you know, the golden
Scott McCrady:goose in a lot of cases.
Scott McCrady:So each of the systems and the goals of the underlying, uh, technology and the
Scott McCrady:underlying organization dictates the use of how the different attacks are done.
Scott McCrady:One of the things in most of the conversations talk about, uh, malicious
Scott McCrady:activities, by the way, because that's what sort of, everyone's used to,
Scott McCrady:like, they think about the virus on the machine, but really in today's world,
Scott McCrady:a significant amount of the attacks and especially the damaging ones start, um,
Scott McCrady:with known username and credentials.
Scott McCrady:And so about 60 to 70% of the actual, um, More damaging attacks actually start from
Scott McCrady:the fact that somebody harvests it, Scott McCrady's credentials and now the bad
Scott McCrady:actors are logging in as Scott McCrady.
Scott McCrady:So, um, now they may in the future drop a piece of code or they may put a file
Scott McCrady:list, uh, executable up in memory that's downloading stuff from the internet.
Scott McCrady:But because we spent so much time talking about malicious attacks and
Scott McCrady:zero days and things like that, it actually does, I think, obfuscate from
Scott McCrady:the fact that there's a whole breadth of breaches that start from the fact
Scott McCrady:that the bad actors are logging in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like this is like phishing attacks and
Scott McCrady:So they're log,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that give their
Scott McCrady:well, no, not even that.
Scott McCrady:So let's, so imagine a phishing attack that says, Hey, you
Scott McCrady:know, um, re-log into Azure ad you click on the button, you put your username
Scott McCrady:and password in, it says, thank you.
Scott McCrady:Now they have your username and
Scott McCrady:password.
Scott McCrady:They log in as Scott McCrady.
Scott McCrady:How do you
Scott McCrady:know that that's not me, right?
Scott McCrady:Because they just logged in as me.
Scott McCrady:So, um, I guess my point being is we talk a lot about malicious,
Scott McCrady:which we should malicious code.
Scott McCrady:There's a whole world around, um, trying to protect
Scott McCrady:organizations from, um, legitimate
Scott McCrady:access
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do you know what the split in your mind, what the split
Prasanna Malaiyandi:between those two categories would be?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Are most of it through the harvesting credentials side of things?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sort of less of it around the malicious attacks.
Scott McCrady:Yeah.
Scott McCrady:60 to 70% of the, uh, of the more significant breaches start with harvest,
Scott McCrady:with some sort of harvested credential.
W. Curtis Preston:and it, it's funny you, you said that literally like the
W. Curtis Preston:question that I was going to ask you before you started talking about this.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so I say a lot that if everyone.
W. Curtis Preston:just use good password, uh, rules.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Which is like not using the same username and password everywhere.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, using mfa,
Scott McCrady:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:you know, and having a decent password.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and not using m or I'm sorry, and, and use mfa if, if just
W. Curtis Preston:everybody did those two things,
W. Curtis Preston:it would stop a significant portion of the attacks out there.
W. Curtis Preston:What do you think about that?
Scott McCrady:If somebody says, what's the one thing I can do?
Scott McCrady:I would say, turn on mfa.
Scott McCrady:Now there's ways of getting around it.
Scott McCrady:Uh, you know, there's
Scott McCrady:there's more elegant means.
Scott McCrady:Most people still think of like the, the phone messages.
Scott McCrady:Uh, but some of the authenticators tied in to, you know, some of the
Scott McCrady:major products these days, um, are, are a lot more seamless than what
Scott McCrady:people probably think they are.
Scott McCrady:Uh, so, um, it, to your point, Curtis, yeah.
Scott McCrady:When I get asked, what's the one thing you do?
Scott McCrady:I'm like, turn on mfa.
Scott McCrady:It's, it's, now there are ways again to get through that, but it is a massive, uh,
Scott McCrady:benefic,
W. Curtis Preston:So let, let, lemme tell you something, uh, Scott,
W. Curtis Preston:there's a, there's a new movie that's in the theaters right now called
W. Curtis Preston:Missing and um, it's, it's a sec.
W. Curtis Preston:It's a standalone sequel to the movie searching.
W. Curtis Preston:Both of them have the same premise where it's, um, where it's somebody's
W. Curtis Preston:searching, looking for somebody that's disappeared and they're doing it all
W. Curtis Preston:on the computer screen and the whole, the whole movie's, the computer screen.
W. Curtis Preston:and and in this movie, one of the plot, you know, developments is
W. Curtis Preston:that the, the character figures out how to hack into an account, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And this person, um, then, then they're able to get into every other account
W. Curtis Preston:cuz they use the same username and password on every one of the accounts.
W. Curtis Preston:And not one of them had MFA turned on , right?
W. Curtis Preston:The movie would've been a lot shorter if, uh, if, if they had
Scott McCrady:A lot less drama if they got caught after five minutes.
Scott McCrady:And, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, but I, I've literally, the, the best part is the
W. Curtis Preston:person that they were able to, uh, do this to is a security specialist,
Scott McCrady:Yeah, of course, of course.
Scott McCrady:Welcome to Hollywood.
Scott McCrady:I, I, uh, I lived in, uh, I lived in, uh, you know, overseas, uh, in a few places.
Scott McCrady:And, uh, there, let's just say that the, uh, viewpoint of Americans
Scott McCrady:was very Hollywood centric.
Scott McCrady:So, you know, they'd be like, you know, are, are gangs just running
Scott McCrady:wild and shooting people on this?
Scott McCrady:We're like, I know, you know, that's not, like, that's not happening.
Scott McCrady:Um, and so Hollywood does tend to, I don't know if you guys
Scott McCrady:remember this movie called Swordfish, where Hugh Jackman early days, and
Scott McCrady:like, he's like dancing in his chair as he's hacking into stuff with
Scott McCrady:like 75 screens up in front of him.
Scott McCrady:And I'm like, yeah, that's, that's exactly, that is literally
Scott McCrady:exactly the way it goes down.
Scott McCrady:That's, that's exactly what happens.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, yeah, it's funny, I, I, I, I gave up like criticizing movies,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, for the most part for that stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and, and more like applauding when they actually get it, uh, correct.
Scott McCrady:yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, which, which is not , which means I don't have to do it very often, so, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So, so you said MFA and Well, let, let me, um, so we, we talked about LastPass,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, and by the way, we did a whole episode on LastPass a couple weeks ago.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and the thing for us, by the way that that's interesting about the
W. Curtis Preston:LastPass story is, is it was their backup system that ultimately, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:was the result of the, it was the, you remember it was a two-phase hack, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And it was the, they ended up being able to access the backup system and
W. Curtis Preston:get, get ac, get their hands on the, you know, the, um, what do you call
W. Curtis Preston:that?
W. Curtis Preston:What do you call that?
W. Curtis Preston:The um, The vault.
W. Curtis Preston:I was gonna use a, like a, anyway, uh, sometime.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm sorry.
W. Curtis Preston:English is not my first language.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, wait, it is.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, that, having, having said that, I am still a
W. Curtis Preston:huge fan of password managers.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I I'm just curious if you have a, if you have a, an alternative to that.
W. Curtis Preston:If you, what, what do you think about password managers
Scott McCrady:I mean, absolutely necessary.
Scott McCrady:Uh, we're going to move away from passwords, so it's gonna become a
W. Curtis Preston:at some point?
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Scott McCrady:in the future.
Scott McCrady:But obviously in today's world, you know, you gotta have a password manager.
Scott McCrady:Uh, but the, and the reality is, is that, uh, the, the joke that we
Scott McCrady:were just making about the Hollywood folks, but it's, it's not an uncommon
Scott McCrady:situation where, uh, you know, the passwords are used more often, you
Scott McCrady:know, more often.
Scott McCrady:And so they're like, well have the, have the 20, you know, letter
Scott McCrady:and number and all that stuff.
Scott McCrady:But again, the way that that's usually, uh, received is from
Scott McCrady:a breach from somewhere else.
Scott McCrady:Or they, they harvest it, right.
Scott McCrady:And.
Scott McCrady:To your point around mfa, changing your passwords, things along those lines.
Scott McCrady:Um, a lot of the work that we do is around securing organizations, uh, obviously
Scott McCrady:from malicious activity, but also from legitimate login via nefarious actors.
Scott McCrady:And so there's, there's outside of, of, um, just looking for malicious
Scott McCrady:code dropped on machines, there's way to look at seeing what people are
Scott McCrady:doing, how they're writing, what things that they're, they're taking care of.
Scott McCrady:So imagine that somebody logs in as, as Scott or Curtis, and they're looking
Scott McCrady:at emails and they want a wire done.
Scott McCrady:This is super common.
Scott McCrady:They'll send a, an email message to someone saying, Hey, this is
Scott McCrady:Scott, please send this wire here.
Scott McCrady:Here's the information.
Scott McCrady:We, there's ways of detecting that now.
Scott McCrady:Um, and just go, okay, that there's almost no chance that Scott, even
Scott McCrady:though they used Scott's name password, he's logged in as him.
Scott McCrady:Uh, maybe it's from a different location than he usually is.
Scott McCrady:There's a lot of his style.
Scott McCrady:Maybe he doesn't put deer in his, you know, response emails.
Scott McCrady:Almost never.
Scott McCrady:I mean, there's all these things that can trigger.
Scott McCrady:That we spend a lot of time on to try to make sure that we can, uh,
Scott McCrady:help secure
Scott McCrady:organizations.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Past guests on the podcast, we've talked
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about that sort of thing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Being able to detect these patterns is sort of fine tuning for each environment.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's sort of complex, and when you end up with a lot of false positives, it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:almost like the boy who cried wolf, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:At some point people just start to ignore those.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So how do you go about this
Scott McCrady:Prasanna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna slip you a 20 after this for leading
Scott McCrady:me, leading into my, uh, my spiel here.
Scott McCrady:Uh, no.
Scott McCrady:I, so I spent 20 years in the MSSP space, right?
Scott McCrady:I, I helped build out, um, the largest MSSP in the world, built out their
Scott McCrady:APJ business, and then ran their global s p business as with Symantec.
Scott McCrady:Um, helped build FireEye, Mandy, and SSP business, uh,
Scott McCrady:and we call it alert fatigue.
Scott McCrady:And so the standard model, uh, is.
Scott McCrady:Uh, you have a person or people, especially in the large enterprise,
Scott McCrady:right, they have to weed their way through the 40, 4500 security vendors,
Scott McCrady:figure out which of 'em, um, look interesting, do proof of concepts on
Scott McCrady:the top two or three, land on one, sign the contract, pay the upfront payment,
Scott McCrady:put the, all the stuff in place.
Scott McCrady:And then when they're done, they kick a bunch of data over to the
Scott McCrady:SS P M S P looks through it all and then sends over alerts going back
Scott McCrady:saying, Hey, this is informational.
Scott McCrady:This is a warning.
Scott McCrady:Which means, I don't know, it could be something bad, could not be bad.
Scott McCrady:I don't know.
Scott McCrady:This one looks critical, looks like there's something bad, but
Scott McCrady:we can't do anything about it.
Scott McCrady:Here's some things you can go check.
Scott McCrady:Um, and that model to me was very broken.
Scott McCrady:And so, especially in the mid-market.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and so we took a very different approach and tried to take the lessons
Scott McCrady:learned from 20 years, uh, of doing this for the global 1000 and, uh, trying
Scott McCrady:to deliver something that is much less alert, fatigue and much more, uh, what
Scott McCrady:we call practical security that, uh, allows organizations to have really.
Scott McCrady:truly, you know, fortune 500 level nation state creates security, but
Scott McCrady:tone down the noise and actually just solve the problems as they come up.
Scott McCrady:Keep the breaches from happening,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because especially in these companies, organizations, I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:should say, they may not have like the same level of security experts as you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:would in those like global one thousands.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so
Prasanna Malaiyandi:they probably don't.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, every once in a while, maybe they spent enough money to hire
Prasanna Malaiyandi:away the right set of folks, right?
Scott McCrady:Mm-hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Scott McCrady:It's very, so what you tend to find in the, so when we built
Scott McCrady:solcyber, we've explicitly said we wanted to target the mid-market because
Scott McCrady:they struggle to get access to the capabilities and when the capabilities are
Scott McCrady:a combination of, of the classic people, process and technology, but a lot of the
Scott McCrady:best in class tech, they don't really sell it below 2000 users, 2000 employees.
Scott McCrady:It's kind of hard to get your hands on it.
Scott McCrady:Um, the stuff we use for user behavioral analysis, If you're below 10,000
Scott McCrady:employees, you're never, you're, you, you're not even going use it.
Scott McCrady:It's too complex, it's too heavy.
Scott McCrady:Um, and so, uh, it's just hard, um, to get ahold of tech.
Scott McCrady:The second thing is, is the right people.
Scott McCrady:And so, you know, you're 400 employees.
Scott McCrady:You may have two or three folks total, right?
Scott McCrady:One person who may be super savvy at security or maybe
Scott McCrady:actually just a good IT person.
Scott McCrady:And so how do they work their way through this
Scott McCrady:massive mound of security stuff to figure out what actually
Scott McCrady:secures the organization?
Scott McCrady:Or you have somebody who's super, super smart, they really understand security.
Scott McCrady:They don't have the
Scott McCrady:people to manage it, the time to put it all in place
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or even budgets.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and so,
Scott McCrady:and then the third one is the budget, right?
Scott McCrady:Is stroking these upfront payments so that you're, you're hitting on the head.
W. Curtis Preston:So two things.
W. Curtis Preston:One is, Uh, time for me to do
W. Curtis Preston:our disclaimer, uh, Prasanna and I work for different companies.
W. Curtis Preston:He works for Zoom.
W. Curtis Preston:I work for Druva.
W. Curtis Preston:And this is a, this is an independent podcast, not a podcast by the
W. Curtis Preston:company and the opinion set.
W. Curtis Preston:You hear our ours.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, also if you wanna join the conversation, reach out to
W. Curtis Preston:me at w Curtis Preston, uh, at gmail or at WC Preston on Twitter.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, you know, join the conversation.
W. Curtis Preston:Also, be sure to rate us, go to your favorite.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, most of you, it looks like you're listening on, uh, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:apple, you know, uh, podcasts.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, just scroll down to the bottom and you can give us, you know, six stars.
W. Curtis Preston:If you can give us six stars, that'd be great.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, by the way, you were, you were talking about, uh, fatigue, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So I just yesterday, so I use, um, uh, Zapier, like an automated tool and I've
W. Curtis Preston:been playing around with it, uh, of doing Reddit searches and, um, Just play.
W. Curtis Preston:You have to be careful with Reddit searches cuz you can get a lot.
W. Curtis Preston:And uh, I was like, oh, I'm gonna pick one of our, without saying who it is one
W. Curtis Preston:of our competitors who has a very unique name that isn't gonna show up anywhere
W. Curtis Preston:other than discussions about them.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I put them in and uh, on the video, uh, I'm gonna take
W. Curtis Preston:this out, but this is today
Scott McCrady:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:and I can't imagine if those were security things
W. Curtis Preston:that I had to actually reply to.
Scott McCrady:That's right.
Scott McCrady:No, guys.
Scott McCrady:It literally came up on a conversation with a customer today is they
Scott McCrady:said, how do you get around this?
Scott McCrady:And we actually spent a lot of time talking through how we, uh,
Scott McCrady:really streamlined the alerts, um, and the responses to make it
Scott McCrady:much more practical because they, they'd used an MSSP in the past and.
Scott McCrady:They're like, it was just like
Scott McCrady:they gave me more work.
Scott McCrady:They didn't save me time.
Scott McCrady:They made my life, they made my life worse.
W. Curtis Preston:By the way, I should have, I should have made you
W. Curtis Preston:do this before, but what is an m s.
Scott McCrady:Ah, managed security service provider.
W. Curtis Preston:thank you.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:what does it do?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:what is that?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Scott McCrady:Yeah, so it's a great question.
Scott McCrady:It started out, um, historically if you, you know, if you guys, we were
Scott McCrady:talking about the eighties before, uh, when firewalls and IDSS came
Scott McCrady:out, large organizations had NOCs,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Network Operation Center,
Scott McCrady:Yes, sir.
Scott McCrady:And so if you think of somebody like Eeds or ibm, they had these big,
Scott McCrady:beautiful BU buildings that showed that the network was all up and
Scott McCrady:running and online and all that jazz.
Scott McCrady:Uh, when all of a sudden these firewalls and IDs is inion detection systems
Scott McCrady:started generating lots of data, nobody knew what to do with them.
Scott McCrady:There was no system to dump that data into, right?
Scott McCrady:And so, um, your first security operation center was one who manages
Scott McCrady:the firewall and the IDs just from a day-to-day care and feeding.
Scott McCrady:But two, the, you, you generate the data in order to do something with it.
Scott McCrady:And.
Scott McCrady:Um, the process of gathering up that data and running analytics against it
Scott McCrady:was really the foundation of the first MSSP and that that contrasts with an
Scott McCrady:msp, which is a managed service provider.
Scott McCrady:And these get confused often.
Scott McCrady:And MSP is basically looking after your it, right?
Scott McCrady:Do you have your laptop set up?
Scott McCrady:Is your email turned on?
Scott McCrady:Um, that is not what an MSSP does and somebody like us, um, which is a
Scott McCrady:specialty mssp, we really focus on the threat and trying to keep organizations
Scott McCrady:protected, you know, against the threat.
Scott McCrady:So we don't, you know, we don't manage firewalls.
Scott McCrady:There's tons of infrastructure companies and MSPs that do that.
Scott McCrady:We'll take a data feed from your firewalls, for instance.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and that's really the core
Scott McCrady:difference.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So when you get this feed, then are you basically acting,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so are you acting on that data or are you sort of crunching it, looking at
Prasanna Malaiyandi:patterns, anomalies, et cetera, and then spitting it back to the customer's?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh, security operation center?
Scott McCrady:right?
Scott McCrady:That's the standard model.
Scott McCrady:What Prasanna?
Scott McCrady:We built something very different.
Scott McCrady:What we did was, we said, um, for a mid-market company, which we consider a
Scott McCrady:hundred users up to about 200 employees, uh, there's a set of stuff everybody
Scott McCrady:needs to secure their environment.
Scott McCrady:We call it foundational coverage.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and if you look at the kill chain, Lockheed Martin kill chain, there's
Scott McCrady:a big one, there's a small one.
Scott McCrady:Um, there's a standard set of activities that a malicious actor
Scott McCrady:goes through in order to breach an organization and then either lock
Scott McCrady:up the data or exfiltrate the data.
Scott McCrady:And so in order to protect against that, you need about eight different things.
Scott McCrady:What we did was we went out and used the tools that we've been using at,
Scott McCrady:you know, these big, big companies and we put those into a package
Scott McCrady:that we call foundational coverage.
Scott McCrady:And we sell that to an organization and it's all inclusive.
Scott McCrady:So you get your, inst your implementation, you get your licensing,
Scott McCrady:you get your management, you get your monitoring, uh, you get your
Scott McCrady:detection, and you get your response.
Scott McCrady:Um, and so our model is very different because.
Scott McCrady:The tech stack that underlines a lot of the problems in the breaches
Scott McCrady:is not under the control of the
Scott McCrady:mssp, it's under the control of the customer.
Scott McCrady:Um, and our view, especially in the mid-market, is they weren't
Scott McCrady:getting best-in-class tools.
Scott McCrady:We used to joke that they've got AV and a firewall, and that's not gonna
Scott McCrady:protect, uh, people in today's world.
Scott McCrady:And so think of NextGen E P P E D R capabilities.
Scott McCrady:Think of user behavioral
W. Curtis Preston:you're gonna have to define that acronym.
Scott McCrady:E P P EDR is basically endpoint protection and
Scott McCrady:endpoint detection and response.
Scott McCrady:And so think of a really high-end piece of code running on a machine
Scott McCrady:that allows one to detect if somebody's changed a, a process on the machine.
Scott McCrady:And two, allows someone like us to get onto that machine
Scott McCrady:and fix it if something malicious is happening.
Scott McCrady:Uh, user behavioral analysis, U B a, um, process of mapping out of people are doing
Scott McCrady:weird random things that appear abnormal.
Scott McCrady:So
W. Curtis Preston:like suddenly uploading a lot of data from somewhere.
Scott McCrady:perfect example.
Scott McCrady:And so these, these components we actually sell per user per month.
Scott McCrady:Now each of these components, usually you have to pay up front for, you
Scott McCrady:have to deploy them, you have to do a POC on 'em, and then you have to
Scott McCrady:obviously, uh, sell, you know, uh, manage 'em and detect and all that stuff.
Scott McCrady:So what we do is very different Prasanna is we sell all of that.
Scott McCrady:Now on top of that core set of stuff that protects every company.
Scott McCrady:There's a lot of other things that people can send to us.
Scott McCrady:We call 'em data feeds.
Scott McCrady:We, we take data feeds from like 400 different technologies
Scott McCrady:and we'll use that as
Scott McCrady:context.
Scott McCrady:We'll correlate all the data, um, and, and things like that.
Scott McCrady:So that's how we do things differently.
W. Curtis Preston:So li a little confused there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um.
W. Curtis Preston:You, it sound like some of the things a person needs to protect
W. Curtis Preston:their environment you provide and some that they're providing.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, so he help me understand that.
Scott McCrady:we draw the line between what we consider in, in infrastructure
Scott McCrady:and then threat.
Scott McCrady:And so what we provide is, is all cloud-based capable, but they're
Scott McCrady:tools that land on the endpoint.
Scott McCrady:And so we start at the user and we say, how do we protect
Scott McCrady:the user and the identity?
Scott McCrady:Um, and things that encompass all of that are included in the service.
Scott McCrady:But if, if a, if an, if a customer said, Hey, I've got 400 employees and I've got
Scott McCrady:two offices and my employees are most of the time at the house, but sometimes come
Scott McCrady:to the office and at the office we have a firewall, um, we're like, great, we'll
Scott McCrady:take a data feed from your firewall, but we're not gonna sell 'em a firewall and
Scott McCrady:implement a firewall because generally speaking, we consider that infrastructure
Scott McCrady:traditionally with sort of security.
Scott McCrady:But a lot of that type of stuff has moved over to an infrastructure team.
Scott McCrady:So whoever's handling their router switches and laptops can
Scott McCrady:usually also deploy the firewall.
Scott McCrady:And that's how we define it.
W. Curtis Preston:Just finished the thought here.
W. Curtis Preston:And what about, what about servers, infrastructure and,
W. Curtis Preston:and cloud infrastructure?
W. Curtis Preston:What about, because it sounds like you're focusing on the endpoint.
W. Curtis Preston:What about that other part of the infrastructure?
Scott McCrady:Uh, so servers we consider an endpoint.
Scott McCrady:Uh, so
Scott McCrady:we can take what we're doing, uh, on, you know, Scott's machine and do it at, at a
Scott McCrady:server, which most of our customers do.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and then cloud.
Scott McCrady:Great question.
Scott McCrady:There's essentially two types of security for the cloud.
Scott McCrady:Uh, the first one is threat.
Scott McCrady:So we can actually take a data feed from every cloud provider's
Scott McCrady:security, uh, tools toolkit.
W. Curtis Preston:Mm-hmm.
Scott McCrady:so that's the cloud watchers, what have you.
Scott McCrady:We can take a data feed and we have a bunch of analytics we run against that.
Scott McCrady:The second piece is, um, a more sophisticated layer
Scott McCrady:of security in the cloud.
Scott McCrady:And so there's tools that can be deployed.
Scott McCrady:Into the cloud.
Scott McCrady:So there's a, there's a concept called, uh, cloud security and posture management.
Scott McCrady:So a lot of your big breaches have happened because somebody left the front
Scott McCrady:door open to their storage . Um, and so what this does is in real time looks for
Scott McCrady:a change in that posture that says that that's now probably an open, uh, an open
Scott McCrady:service or an open storage, uh, container.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and so there's tools that can be deployed, deployed there,
Scott McCrady:and we offer all those, we call those extended coverage options
Scott McCrady:because not every customer has a sophisticated cloud infrastructure.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and so we don't put that in foundational because not
Scott McCrady:every customer needs it.
Scott McCrady:Uh, but uh, we do offer those as extended
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do you support?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like I know you talked about server, you talked about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:device, you talked about cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:What about SaaS services?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like are there things you do around Microsoft 365?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and other services like Salesforce, et cetera,
Scott McCrady:Yeah, great question.
Scott McCrady:So the.
Scott McCrady:Majority, probably 80% of our customers are, are, have a cross section of things.
Scott McCrady:That cross section tends to be, uh, mostly remote with some, some
Scott McCrady:small offices, very sass heavy.
Scott McCrady:Right.
Scott McCrady:Um, and on Office 365, that would be like, if you were to say draw the circle, right.
Scott McCrady:80% would sort of land there.
Scott McCrady:And first of all, office 365 provides a lot of amazing identity telemetry.
Scott McCrady:So we scoop all that up and we, uh, we tie it into the back end
Scott McCrady:so that we can actually get the ID telemetry and correlate that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's like the data stream that we talked
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about with the firewalls.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Similar to that, you just get a data stream.
Scott McCrady:exactly, and, and part of the reason why that matters is,
Scott McCrady:and this goes back to the whole alert, fatigue and noise and the, it's very
Scott McCrady:common in a lot of situations where the MSSP is saying something like, ten,
Scott McCrady:ten, ten seven we think has a problem.
Scott McCrady:Sort of like this.
Scott McCrady:These are the four things you need to go check.
Scott McCrady:And then, Prasanna or Curtis, you guys go run off and check it and
Scott McCrady:you come back and say, I'm not sure.
Scott McCrady:And then you contact us and we go back and forth.
Scott McCrady:What we're doing is we're switching that and we're trying to say, um, Scott
Scott McCrady:McCrady and his machine have a problem.
Scott McCrady:And we know that based on the identity data, the machine data, the user
Scott McCrady:data, um, and, and, and this is how we
Scott McCrady:solve that problem.
Scott McCrady:So because we track to user instead of the ips and knowledge
W. Curtis Preston:And, And, it sounds like you're able to, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:actually stop it, that you c you can actually affect the change necessary.
Scott McCrady:we can.
Scott McCrady:So we do.
Scott McCrady:So one of the frustrating parts of of security is these words
Scott McCrady:get sort of used by everybody.
Scott McCrady:And so there's a concept called response.
Scott McCrady:And so a lot of companies are not what I would call, they're being disingenuous in
Scott McCrady:the fact that they say they do response, but what they really are doing is notifi.
Scott McCrady:they're saying, Hey, we think we, we think we detected something, and
Scott McCrady:we're sending you a notification.
Scott McCrady:They call that response.
Scott McCrady:What we do is actual response.
Scott McCrady:So if we are, if we see, uh, a hash on a process change that we know
Scott McCrady:should never change, we're gonna go back there and try to quarantine that
Scott McCrady:process, quarantine that machine.
Scott McCrady:We're gonna do something if we can.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and that's, that's a fundamental difference about what we do because
Scott McCrady:again, if you're looking at the mid-market, do they have the people that
Scott McCrady:know how to go research and track that down and, and do what they need to do?
Scott McCrady:Oftentimes not
W. Curtis Preston:so let me ask you this.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and I'm, I'm gonna preface my statement slash question with,
W. Curtis Preston:with the following statement.
W. Curtis Preston:I have never.
W. Curtis Preston:Bought a security product in my life.
W. Curtis Preston:. Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Like for IT infrastructure.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, obviously some stuff's from my own stuff, right?
W. Curtis Preston:But not nothing for a company.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I looked at your pricing model.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, first I did one of the simplest pricing models I've ever seen.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I like that.
Scott McCrady:one SKU,
W. Curtis Preston:What's that?
Scott McCrady:one
W. Curtis Preston:exactly?
Scott McCrady:Customers don't believe it.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I will say that I choked a little when I saw the number.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, that's why I'm saying I prefaced this with, I've never
W. Curtis Preston:paid for anything like this before.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it, it, it just seemed like a lot be because it was per user, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I believe the current, it was current was $57, I think per.
Scott McCrady:$57.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:So I'm sitting here going, so if I have, so you're going for the
W. Curtis Preston:mid-market, I've got 500 employees, I'm gonna be paying you $25,000 a month.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, that seems like a lot to me.
Scott McCrady:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:me understand how that compares
Scott McCrady:that's not a, that's not a lot
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah,
Scott McCrady:Um, no, it's a great question.
Scott McCrady:First of all, I wa it is funny because as far as I know, we're one
Scott McCrady:of the only companies that actually puts our pricing on our website.
Scott McCrady:Uh, so we have the sing, which we call, um, annoyances, and
Scott McCrady:we put make cartoons about it.
Scott McCrady:And so you'll go out to these, security comes, it'll like,
Scott McCrady:it'll be pricing, you'll click on it and we like contact sales.
Scott McCrady:Um, so we actually list out our pricing.
Scott McCrady:Now, I will say we have bands, so we, and we don't list out every
Scott McCrady:band, cuz that'd just be sort
Scott McCrady:of silly.
Scott McCrady:But, um, so obviously, you know, we're working with a company
Scott McCrady:that's like 4,000 employees.
Scott McCrady:You know, the band's lower than $57.
Scott McCrady:But candidly most com most of the time we sell our deals are at $57.
Scott McCrady:And the way it breaks down is a very basic security stack, not
Scott McCrady:even the stuff that we're doing.
Scott McCrady:If you're a 200 employee company, you're going to run about $40 in
Scott McCrady:license costs per user, per year.
Scott McCrady:Oh, sorry.
Scott McCrady:For per, per user, per month.
Scott McCrady:$40 and just the
W. Curtis Preston:just licensing.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
Scott McCrady:but all that licensing is going to be actual annual paid up front.
Scott McCrady:So they, you don't get charged per user per month.
Scott McCrady:You'd have to back into it.
Scott McCrady:You say, well, I'm gonna pay a hundred thousand dollars divided
Scott McCrady:by 200, you know, divided by 12.
Scott McCrady:So most organizations pay around $40 for what we'd call, you know,
Scott McCrady:relatively mid-tier cap capabilities.
Scott McCrady:Now, mid-tier tools, these aren't best
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:That's just a softer stack,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Yeah.
Scott McCrady:just the software stack, and this is street price by the way.
Scott McCrady:This is all stuff we've purchased in our life that we actually know exactly.
Scott McCrady:I mean, we got to, um, this things that we've, we've purchased.
Scott McCrady:So that's before you get somebody that actually has to deploy it and manage it,
Scott McCrady:has to, that's gonna run the simulations.
Scott McCrady:Um, so that's before what we call care and Feeding.
Scott McCrady:Uh, care and feeding for a standard 200 employee company for, uh, again, a basic
Scott McCrady:security stack is a person, it's a.
Scott McCrady:Today's world called a hundred, $125,000, um, for, you know, a
Scott McCrady:semicon for a competent IT person.
Scott McCrady:Uh, so there you go.
Scott McCrady:Right there, right?
Scott McCrady:So you're already over 57.
Scott McCrady:That's before you get into detecting response.
Scott McCrady:So that's before you actually take all that data out of there and run into
Scott McCrady:a 24 by seven system and then, you know, responds at whatever two in the
Scott McCrady:morning and actually fixes the problem.
Scott McCrady:So we tend to be about 40 to 50% cheaper, believe it or not, um, to do this than
Scott McCrady:actually trying to build it yourself.
Scott McCrady:Uh, we also don't charge upfront fees.
Scott McCrady:So we financially companies love it.
Scott McCrady:And to give you a sense, an MSP that if you were, if you were a hundred
Scott McCrady:or 200 person company, almost all of, use an MSP to manage their laptops and
Scott McCrady:their, you know, email and all that, they charge about 150 to 200 bucks
Scott McCrady:per user per month to do all that.
Scott McCrady:So,
Scott McCrady:um, we tend to get very, very, Yeah, we, we tend to get very, we're people
Scott McCrady:are very complimentary of the model.
Scott McCrady:We, we, uh, businesses is relatively speaking pretty good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Wow, that's Well, and just in my head I'm going and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:thinking about, okay, so there was like, you were talking about the M S P was
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like a hundred to 150 a user, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Security is like 50 a user.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And then I started thinking about, okay, backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And it's like backup is such a small percentage of that if you think about
W. Curtis Preston:Well,
W. Curtis Preston:but yeah, that, and that, that was the problem, Scott, because I'm
W. Curtis Preston:comparing it to like, what we charge and you know, we're, we're like a
W. Curtis Preston:couple of dollars a user, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but it, it's not the same, you know, it's not the same.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so that's, that's where my sticker shot came from.
W. Curtis Preston:But I, by the way, I, I am, you know, I, I get the thing that I work for a
W. Curtis Preston:SaaS company and that of course I'm gonna like the SaaS pricing model, but
W. Curtis Preston:I really like a SaaS pricing model.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, the, the
W. Curtis Preston:old, the old way
Prasanna Malaiyandi:three-year
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, the way you have to buy a.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Exact three year contracts, five year contracts, having to, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, on our, on our, in our world, I have to size everything, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I have to,
W. Curtis Preston:how big will my backups be in three years?
W. Curtis Preston:No freaking idea.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:And so I'm gonna oversize it and overspend and I have to buy it all now.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and 90% of it's gonna go unused.
Scott McCrady:we talked about the Netflix model, right?
Scott McCrady:Or your streaming service model of choice, which, but you all remember, I
Scott McCrady:mean, um, Curtis, you and I are probably older than Prasanna, which I, you know,
Scott McCrady:but
W. Curtis Preston:we are.
Scott McCrady:like,
Scott McCrady:we're probably technically savvy people.
Scott McCrady:So I built a media server at one point in time.
Scott McCrady:I went out and bought all my CDs or Blu-ray discs, and then I bought my
Scott McCrady:media server and I got my Plex server, and I sort of had, quote unquote,
Scott McCrady:on demand entertainment, right?
Scott McCrady:I built it
Scott McCrady:all, and then Netflix came around and basically said, Hey,
Scott McCrady:we're gonna do all that for you.
Scott McCrady:Stream it to you, give you a lot more choices, and we're gonna charge you 9 99.
Scott McCrady:and I was like, I
Scott McCrady:don't really need my media.
Scott McCrady:I mean, I still have it
Scott McCrady:. Um, and so that's the
Scott McCrady:I say it's all the time.
Scott McCrady:It's lost in the eighties.
Scott McCrady:You're going to, you gotta still go build this crap all the time.
Scott McCrady:Pay up front, stitch it all together.
Scott McCrady:Hopefully it works.
Scott McCrady:Oh, by the way, we're not 4k.
Scott McCrady:So now you gotta change it all out so the latest threat comes out and
Scott McCrady:all of a sudden your current security stack doesn't work against it.
Scott McCrady:And there's nobody that's actually solving that problem.
Scott McCrady:and and that's what we're trying to solve.
W. Curtis Preston:As soon as, as soon as you said you had a, and by
W. Curtis Preston:the way, my, my media library or the hardware that comprised my media
W. Curtis Preston:library is right over there in a box . That's, that's gonna go somewhere.
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz I had to save, had the same exact thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think the other thing with the SaaS service, and I don't
Prasanna Malaiyandi:know if you do this as well, Scott, it's.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:unlike in backup, where you'd have to wait for like the patches to come
Prasanna Malaiyandi:out, and then you'd have to deploy it across your entire infrastructure,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and that takes time in scheduling.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:With the SaaS service, a lot of times you get the benefits of, Hey, it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:easier to push updates and upgrade without having to sort of wait for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:some IT person to be like, yeah, let me go schedule these things.
Scott McCrady:No, it's, it's, it's true.
Scott McCrady:So again, we target mid-market and we we're very explicit about that.
Scott McCrady:But one of the reasons is everything we do in the stack itself, so all
Scott McCrady:these best in breed products are now all cloud-based or on, they have both.
Scott McCrady:Some have both.
Scott McCrady:Most of 'em are cloud have shifted.
Scott McCrady:So none of our stuff's on-prim except for the stuff we have to put on
Scott McCrady:the actual endpoint itself.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and so it gives us this unique ability to up, we update the
Scott McCrady:service about every six months.
Scott McCrady:So as we see the threat change, uh, as we see something coming down the.
Scott McCrady:As cyber insurance changes, uh, we just update the service.
Scott McCrady:Um, and as a foundational coverage customer, it's included.
Scott McCrady:So you get on your quarterly business review and we say, Hey, now you get, you
Scott McCrady:know, we added in proactive threat, you know, uh, intelligence, blah, blah, blah.
Scott McCrady:This is
Scott McCrady:you, you now have access to it
Scott McCrady:So we just turn it on.
Scott McCrady:Some stuff
W. Curtis Preston:beauty, that is the beauty of SaaS
W. Curtis Preston:my friend.
Scott McCrady:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, we say the same thing.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I'm looking at, and we don't have time to cover all these things,
W. Curtis Preston:but I'm just sort of scrolling through on Solcyber, by the way.
W. Curtis Preston:Tell me, uh, tell me what the story behind the name.
W. Curtis Preston:So l cyber.com.
Scott McCrady:So, uh, sun, so it was basically, you
Scott McCrady:know, a play on, on sun cyber.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and so obviously we're in Texas, it's warm.
Scott McCrady:Um, . And so the idea was really around the fact of soul, cyber, sun Bright.
Scott McCrady:Um, we wanted to be approachable.
Scott McCrady:Um, approachability as a concept, you know, this and security is like,
Scott McCrady:you know, here's the angry falcon as it sweeps down upon you, right?
Scott McCrady:Um, we didn't want to be a bird of prey because everybody's a bird of prey.
Scott McCrady:Um, so we were trying to figure out like, what's, what's approachable,
Scott McCrady:what's, what's more, uh, interesting and what's our, what's our tone of voice?
Scott McCrady:And so we thought soul cyber was just a, an approachable,
Scott McCrady:bright, uh, airy type, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I like it.
W. Curtis Preston:And Trademarkable, and you can get a, you can get
W. Curtis Preston:a, uh, domain name . So there's, so that's always helpful.
Scott McCrady:The domain name does come in handy.
W. Curtis Preston:what's that?
Scott McCrady:The domain name is Handy
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, absolutely.
W. Curtis Preston:So just curious, uh, um, do you have any advice for our, our backup listeners
W. Curtis Preston:specifically, you know, with regards to protecting backup infrastructure?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you have any thoughts there?
Scott McCrady:first of all.
Scott McCrady:I mean, kudos to them because we do what we do because we really attack sort of
Scott McCrady:the, the threat aspect of life for our
Scott McCrady:customers.
Scott McCrady:But there's a lot of, um, runway organizations can get by doing
Scott McCrady:what I call the basics, right?
Scott McCrady:And so people are always asking me like, what do you tell kids or young
Scott McCrady:people about like being successful in a career or what have you?
Scott McCrady:And I'm like, do the basics.
Scott McCrady:Be nice, show up on time, like be easy to get along with.
Scott McCrady:And it's sort of the same when it comes to security, right?
Scott McCrady:Confidentiality, integrity, and availability is the three
Scott McCrady:pillars of, of security.
Scott McCrady:We handle piece of that.
Scott McCrady:But the concept around like MFA and what we're gonna talk about here, um,
Scott McCrady:disaster recovery in the form of backup.
Scott McCrady:If companies were to do that effectively, uh, and manage it well, uh, a whole bunch
Scott McCrady:of problems sort of get solved and a bunch of risk gets taken off the table.
Scott McCrady:And so, uh, the first thing I'd say is, is will you tell everybody, you
Scott McCrady:know, they, they need to have 'em done.
Scott McCrady:They need to be tested.
Scott McCrady:You probably need to use a service.
Scott McCrady:Um, so that, you know, you take, again, you take some of that risk off the table.
Scott McCrady:Do you really wanna be checking your backups, uh, yourself And
Scott McCrady:most com Most people don't.
Scott McCrady:They
Scott McCrady:just don't.
Scott McCrady:They, they say they do, but they don't, right?
Scott McCrady:They don't have the time.
Scott McCrady:Life gets in the way.
Scott McCrady:So, um, it's absolutely critical.
Scott McCrady:100% mission critical to every organization.
Scott McCrady:We recommend it.
Scott McCrady:Um, a lot of the MSPs we partner with, uh, do it on behalf of the customers.
Scott McCrady:Um, and, uh, it's just something that is, is you can't, you cannot not do it in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and you were
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:No, we have, we, we have a, uh, Druva has a big s p program now.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so trying to roll that out.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, by the way, our name came from,
W. Curtis Preston:it's the Sanskrit word for North Star.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so we're leading the way.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know if she That's So you're after a son?
W. Curtis Preston:We're after a star.
Scott McCrady:Mm-hmm.
Scott McCrady:. You gotta pick something,
Scott McCrady:right?
Scott McCrady:Some
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Scott, I know previously earlier we were talking about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of how you map everything to users.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:When you go into these environments with backup servers or with things
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that need to be backed up, do you consider that the same as any other
Prasanna Malaiyandi:user device in the environment?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Where it is critical, it is important to make sure that's secure, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just like anything in, probably, it's actually more important to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:make sure that's very secure, just given all the data that's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of associated with backups.
Scott McCrady:Yeah.
Scott McCrady:Again, good question.
Scott McCrady:So there's two answers to that.
Scott McCrady:Um, is one you do actually.
Scott McCrady:Uh, so there was, there was, if we back up actually, and, and you all
Scott McCrady:may remember these days, there was a really big push around information,
Scott McCrady:um, attribution, uh, in classification.
Scott McCrady:And this was maybe seven or eight years ago.
Scott McCrady:And EY and Accenture, all these guys were like, let's go classify
Scott McCrady:all your information and then we're gonna have different security levels.
Scott McCrady:Relatively the classification of the information super makes
Scott McCrady:sense in, in, in life, right?
Scott McCrady:But it's like trying to keep your Tupper war drawer, you know, organized.
Scott McCrady:Like unless you're that company.
Scott McCrady:It's gonna be a mess relatively soon, even if you're a super organized, uh, person.
Scott McCrady:And so this whole concept around the classification of the
Scott McCrady:underlying assets and information sort of fell by the wayside.
Scott McCrady:Um, and so our view is a much, um, again, we, we call ourselves practical
Scott McCrady:security, as much more practical view.
Scott McCrady:So there's a set of tools that we deployed to every entity, right?
Scott McCrady:Most of those are tied to a user, but the servers, backup
Scott McCrady:servers, all that we deploy.
Scott McCrady:And the second thing is we actually, in the onboarding process, we classify
Scott McCrady:at a much more high level, um, the different types of assets, right?
Scott McCrady:And so, you know, CEOs, CFOs, like cfo, uh, if, if we see, uh, certain
Scott McCrady:types of emails going out from the cfo, they trigger faster than if we
Scott McCrady:see it going out from somebody else.
Scott McCrady:Same thing comes to the underlying assets of the server.
Scott McCrady:So if you are running a certain type of, of server and we see certain types
Scott McCrady:of information going to it, , we'll, we've already classified that at a
Scott McCrady:high level and said, okay, that's, you know, that's, that's benign
Scott McCrady:or that should never be happening.
Scott McCrady:And so we actually have the ability to, um, prioritize different types of assets.
Scott McCrady:Um, and, and that does apply towards certain types of servers, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I'm assuming that they would be able to send a data stream
Prasanna Malaiyandi:from like your backup logs or the backup server to you guys to be able to detect.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And Curtis, maybe this could be one way to catch, I know we talk a lot
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about ransomware and how it goes and deletes all your backups, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:, if they sent you a log of, Hey, here's a data stream of events happening.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's probably something that could be flagged from a security perspective.
Scott McCrady:you know, it's a great question.
Scott McCrady:I don't know.
Scott McCrady:We actually do take, um, logs from backup systems.
Scott McCrady:Uh, and we have, we have correlated.
Scott McCrady:It's a great, it's a great question, prana.
Scott McCrady:I, it is now on my list with my CTO on our one-on-one tomorrow.
Scott McCrady:Um, because we have the capability, but I don't know, I can't think of anybody
Scott McCrady:having
Prasanna Malaiyandi:because it'd
Prasanna Malaiyandi:be.
Scott McCrady:um, but theoretically,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:things that we, that we've seen at least in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:some cases is right, hacker gets in, they then go to the backup server,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:they disable all the jobs, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They delete all of 'em, and then they delete all the backups that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:exist, and now you're screwed.
Scott McCrady:Yep.
Scott McCrady:And nobody's there.
Scott McCrady:I mean, this is the reason why you do detect and response
Scott McCrady:is literally that story.
Scott McCrady:Now
Scott McCrady:you just used it for backups, but at some point in time there was alerts
Scott McCrady:going off that said that something, something, something's happening
Scott McCrady:that should not be happening, right?
Scott McCrady:And so imagine that's really the
Scott McCrady:job that we have, um, across a, an organization saying there's things
Scott McCrady:that are happening that, and there are
Scott McCrady:things sending off alerts that are notifying that
Scott McCrady:something, that something nefarious is going on.
Scott McCrady:So now imagine, again, we don't manage a backup system,
Scott McCrady:but imagine that we contact.
Scott McCrady:Or whomever and they said, oh,
Scott McCrady:crap.
Scott McCrady:And then they went in, fixed it.
Scott McCrady:Right.
Scott McCrady:That's really the goal, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Sounds great.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, , so, so, we could talk about this for a while.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and also apparently backups, I'm sorry, uh, barbecue
W. Curtis Preston:and, uh, media streamers and Thai food.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, sounds like we have a lot of the same interests.
W. Curtis Preston:Scott, um, by the way, you have to come, you know, if
Scott McCrady:be beer and bourbon are also on my list.
Scott McCrady:So if
W. Curtis Preston:now see there, there's one.
W. Curtis Preston:That's one vice we do not share.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm
W. Curtis Preston:not a huge, uh, any fan of like, bourbon, whiskey, scotch, any of that.
W. Curtis Preston:I've never, I've never crossed that.
W. Curtis Preston:But
Scott McCrady:German and my dad's Scottish, so I, I don't have a choice.
Scott McCrady:I like, I think it's in, I think, I think as in the dna
W. Curtis Preston:um, I, um, uh, but if you want to come down
W. Curtis Preston:to San Diego anytime, uh, and fi
W. Curtis Preston:and, you know, have some, have some, actual Mexican food, not the stuff
W. Curtis Preston:you guys have over there, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Not the
Scott McCrady:I used to do a lot of work in utc actually.
Scott McCrady:That is, it is a beautiful area,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it's a, it is, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:La Jolla, which is, uh, Spanish for expensive af.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway, um, so , so, uh, thanks.
W. Curtis Preston:Thanks a lot, Scott.
W. Curtis Preston:It's been a great conversation.
Scott McCrady:Ah, thanks for having me.
Scott McCrady:Hopefully as useful.
Scott McCrady:I know, uh, uh, the Dr and the backup people out there, uh, appreciate the
Scott McCrady:work and, uh, if any of you are, are like, man, I'm not sure if our security
Scott McCrady:is where it needs to be, then feel free to reach out Scott@soulcyber.com
Scott McCrady:or obviously solcyber.com.
Scott McCrady:Uh, you can find us
W. Curtis Preston:Absolutely.
W. Curtis Preston:And Prasanna, thanks again for your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I try.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I try, and Scott, good luck with moose.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hopefully he's quieted down back there.
Scott McCrady:He is, he's already back to his nap.
Scott McCrady:It was, uh, obviously, uh, he, he, he wrestled that, uh, piece of, uh,
Scott McCrady:sweet potato to the ground, so he's
W. Curtis Preston:It's a tough, tough day to be a dog.
W. Curtis Preston:So I don't, we don't have a dog, but we have, uh, we have a grand dog.
W. Curtis Preston:Her name is Brulee.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, uh, she's a cockapoo and adorable, but, uh, and her favorite person
W. Curtis Preston:in the world is my wife for some reason.
W. Curtis Preston:But anyway, uh, well listen, thanks to our listeners.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you know, we'd be nothing without you, and be sure to subscribe