Speaker:

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