It was a true pleasure for Aviva Zacks of Safety Detectives to meet with Maya Gershon, CRO of Vade Secure. She asked all about how her company stays ahead of its competition.
Safety Detectives: Could you tell me about your cybersecurity background?
Maya Gershon: I was drafted into the cyber unit in the Israeli army at 17. That brought me where I am today. I fell in love with technology and with cybersecurity. Even though I didn’t work in cybersecurity right after leaving the army, I did stay up to speed with the technology the whole time. My other experience around cybersecurity was when I was responsible for cybersecurity in one of the companies I was working for, in corporate development and product.
SD: What do you love about it?
MG: I love the fact that it is the good guys against the bad guys, and I like to be part of the good guys. I also love the fact that it is constantly changing, and it’s kind of an endless chase. And I love the fact that it’s super high-tech and at the edge of new technology.
SD: Can you just give me a description of what your company does?
MG: Vade Secure started as an email filtering solution, but we’re doing many more things around cybersecurity today, including AI, threat remediation, and incident response. We work through channels, and we protect companies from cyberattacks. There are some recent cases of criminals hacking into major institutions in the US, also in other places of the world. We stop that from happening.
About 92% of all cyberattacks come from email, and often, attacks are successful because of human behavior, so when we see an attack, we not only block it, but we also remediate it by removing any threats from inboxes. And we teach the user what they should do in order to not let attacks through in the future.
SD: What types of verticals use your services?
MG: All types. From a company with two people to a company with thousands of people, they all need email protection, as well as remediation and user training. We have very small companies in our customer base, but we also have most of the largest ISPs and Telcos in the world using our products.
SD: How does your company stay ahead of the competition?
MG: We stay ahead of the competition because we have a data set that is just incredible. We are actually second only to Google! We protect more than 1 billion mailboxes, and our machine learning processes these mailboxes on a daily basis to identify threats. The amount of data that you analyze is key to the quality of machine learning, and we have this huge amount of data. In addition, we obviously have a very sophisticated machine learning technology and we have built a very, very good filter. The barrier to entry into this market and to be one of our competitors is very high because of the amount of data that Vade already has.
SD: What would you say are the worst cyberthreats today?
MG: We just saw the SolarWinds case and the breach on US government agencies. SolarWinds’ software is widely used by MSPs, many of whom service key governmental institutions; the breach on many of the institutions in the SolarWinds hack was through their MSP. We sell through MSPs, and this is very interesting because it’s not like the attack was directed at the institution that they wanted to attack, but it was through the MSP. MSPs today need to understand that they need to be really, really protected and to protect themselves much better because they can be a gateway to another company.
SD: How do you think the pandemic is going to affect cybersecurity for the future?
MG: We did some analysis about the pandemic and the number of attacks during the pandemic that we see in our filter. We have seen a huge increase in attacks ever since COVID-19 started—a really significant increase in attacks. Since there are many more attacks, we need to level up our protection.