Aviva Zacks sat down with Morten Kjaersgaard, CEO of Heimdal Security, to find out how his company’s AdminPrivilege™ tool is helping admins keep end-users safe from cyberattacks.
Safety Detective: Tell me how you got into cybersecurity and what you love about it.
Morten Kjaersgaard: I worked in all kinds of sales and technical roles and then started working to get into cybersecurity. In 2008, I was recruited by BullGuard, one of the first antivirus vendors in the market. Cybersecurity was a good fit for me because I had a flair for understanding technical attacks and the mental perception of the user both on a B2B and B2C side.
SD: How does Heimdal help end-users and companies prevent cyberattacks?
MK: Cybersecurity is very complex, and we try to make it very simple for small to medium businesses and large-scale enterprises. Our palette of products in one single endpoint agent is very wide. We have an automated patch management module, for both companies and end-users, and we just acquired a privilege rights management tool, which we call AdminPrivilege™. With this tool, an administrator can remove a user’s rights, and the user will need to get admin permission to install something. The interesting thing is that about 90% of attacks would not occur if each user didn’t have administrator rights on their desktop.
Our palette is even more wide, also offering Threat Prevention and Next-Gen Antivirus, which can be bound together into a nice EDR package. Not only are the products themselves unique, but the combination even more so and we don’t really see that kind of offering anywhere else in the market.
We also offer free resources such as cybersecurity courses that individuals and even high schools are using. We also have a free security tip guide about how you should configure the security on your desktop.
SD: What industries does Heimdal service and why do they need your services the most?
MK: We have some unique threat intelligence that serves the banking sector well, so when you do your online banking, the product offers you special intelligence targeted towards threats, reducing your risk of fraud.
The energy sector is another industry that uses our services because it is a very critical infrastructure environment, requiring threat prevention.
SD: How do you see cybersecurity developing in the next five years or so?
MK: I see the future happening already. It’s getting more and more segmented across the market and the verticals that hackers are targeting. If you look at the technical evolution of malware over the last five years, it has evolved more than it did in the previous 20 years. This industry’s curve is moving a lot more quickly than other industries are because there is so much technology acceleration behind it.