Q&A With HYAS

Aviva Zacks Aviva Zacks

Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.

HYAS: HYAS was created to change the cybersecurity industry and has quickly become a valued partner and world-leading authority on cyber adversary infrastructure and communication to that infrastructure. We started in a small town in British Columbia and grew to have personnel across the United States and Canada with active customers in multiple verticals across three continents. We help organizations see more, do more, and understand more about the nature of the threats they face, or don’t even realize they are facing, in real-time. Our mission is to thwart cyberattacks before they happen, and in doing so provide organizations with the confidence to move business full-forward, safely and securely.

SD: What is the main service your company offers?

HYAS: HYAS provides two key related but distinct SaaS solutions, both of which utilize our unique data lake.

HYAS Protect, named by CISA and the NSA in their Protective DNS memo, uses machine learning combined with authoritative attacker infrastructure knowledge and unrivaled domain-based intelligence to not only proactively protect organizations but also augment and improve the efficacy of their existing components. Our combination of infrastructure expertise and multivariate pattern analysis provides an immediate, reliable, and high-fidelity source of truth to mitigate threats in real-time. HYAS Protect doesn’t need to scan content, works across all communication protocols encrypted or not, and addresses not only security controls for laptops, desktops, and mobile devices, but also that of production environments and the wider IoT space.

Its sister product,HYAS Insight, provides underlying intelligence, visibility, and deep data so that threat and fraud response teams can understand everything they need to know about the attack, including the attack origin and campaign infrastructure, both current and future. Top Fortune 100 companies rely on our unparalleled data and nontraditional collection mechanisms to power, enhance, and enable their security and fraud investigations, allowing them to accelerate and close investigations over 3x faster and with increased accuracy.

SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?

HYAS: First, HYAS doesn’t say “rip and replace” — HYAS solutions are built to integrate into the existing security stack and not just provide unique value, but also complement, augment, and extend the efficacy of the current security architecture and solutions.

Second, HYAS solutions are built to be flexible — they can be utilized through our SaaS UI or via our easily integratable APIs. They are designed to adapt and integrate into a customer’s existing architecture, rather than forcing the organization to make fundamental changes to it.

Ultimately, HYAS gives customers the visibility and actionable intelligence they require by connecting specific attack instances and campaigns to billions of historical and current indicators of compromise. Our unique datasets, combined with aggregation and correlation capabilities, enable cyber security professionals to discover, investigate, attribute, and monitor adversary campaign infrastructure well before an attack. While most of the industry is focused on trying to block the many ways threat actors can get in, we go one step further by blocking the command and control (C2), eliminating their one way out. Schedule a personal demo today to see for yourself.

SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?

HYAS: Enterprise networks and architectures are more complicated today than ever before. As an unintended side effect of the adoption of cloud services and the utilization of and integration with various solution APIs in all directions, it has become increasingly difficult to monitor everything, which in turn has made it increasingly easier for malicious actors to infiltrate and hide. No longer is it the role of cybersecurity to detect the “needle in the haystack”; what’s required is actually detecting the needle in a stack of needles.

Some of the worst cyberthreats today are those that utilize the new architectures to easily infiltrate and masquerade their actions; for instance, by infecting a low-level library commonly used in building, integrating with, and delivering service, or by making their C2 communication appear to be normal network traffic. This allows hackers to not only infiltrate multiple organizations simultaneously but also to stay hidden once they do.

This is exactly why HYAS created HYAS Protect. It can uniquely and efficiently identify, mitigate, and block the C2 communication that shouldn’t be occurring. Built for today’s architectures, HYAS Protect is focused on identifying and preventing not just the common easily identified attacks, but the worst of the worst as well.

About the Author
Aviva Zacks
Aviva Zacks
Cybersecurity Expert and Writer

About the Author

Aviva Zacks is a content manager, writer, editor, and really good baker. When she's not working, she enjoys reading on her porch swing with a cup of decaf.