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The recent increase in high profile cybersecurity breaches to corporate and government networks has influenced investors to seek out cybersecurity firms that have cutting edge technology that helps to prevent and track attacks. Ziften, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, are among the companies that have recently attracted a powerful round of funding to assist with the development and expansion of their security competencies.
There has been a growing debate developing about how organizations can best handle expensive breaches with hackers now provided with more exploitation opportunities due to the increasing number of web connected devices. The announcement of Ziften’s funding comes amidst the debate.
Ziften CEO Chuck Leaver was asked to help put these recent developments in security threats into perspective.
When asked why endpoint security is one of the hottest sectors in the tech industry right now Chuck Leaver replied “because that is where the vulnerabilities live, both in terms of the actual devices, the software and apps they run, and the users themselves. Research continues to show that the endpoint is the largest threat vector for companies and we now know that the concept of full prevention of attacks is unrealistic. Thus, endpoint security has really entered into a new generation of technologies like Ziften that allow companies real-time and always-on visibility of every endpoint so that they can more rapidly detect attacks and know exactly how to respond. Our users are seeing, on average, a 70% reduction in their incident response time because of this continuous endpoint visibility, and we all know that in security every minute counts.”
Leaver believes that the growth of the Internet of Things will provide more opportunities for intruders “the IoT arena is estimated to grow to around 50 billion connected devices by 2020, but scarier is the fact that the average connected device has more than 20 identified security vulnerabilities. Attackers simply see these as an extension of the endpoint and the threat vector getting larger and larger. Certainly there will be attacks centered at the devices themselves, for example automobiles, but the true issue is how these devices are connected back into much larger and more lucrative systems that companies must protect.”
Chuck Leaver went on to say “let’s be honest, before the ‘Internet of Things’ we weren’t really doing a great job with security anyhow, so we have to start thinking differently about how this growth in endpoints must be protected and in many instances break free of some of the legacy ideas around endpoint security.”
Release ID: 87472