Published on: February 3, 2025 Updated 2 times since publishing
SafetyDetectives had the opportunity to interview Stefan Uygur, CEO of Dectar, to explore his journey in cybersecurity and the inspiration behind founding Dectar. With decades of experience in IT security and a passion for open-source technology, Stefan identified a critical gap in the industry: the overwhelming number of cybersecurity solutions offering only incremental improvements without real innovation. In response, he launched Dectar with the vision of consolidating essential security features into a single, highly effective, prevention-first platform.
In this interview, Stefan discusses how ACSIA SOS, Dectar’s flagship extended cybersecurity solution, differentiates itself through its open detection engine, predictive threat prevention, and automated response capabilities. He also shares insights into scalability, automation, and the future of cybersecurity, including Dectar’s plans to expand into mobile security and cloud integrations.
Can you introduce yourself and talk about what led you to found the Dectar?
I have been involved in cybersecurity since the age of 14, my interest in cyber extends to both personal and professional sides of my life. I am a Free Open Source Community member and pioneer since the foundation of the Open Source movement. I’ve been working for 2 decades with global top 10 tech companies mainly looking after IT infrastructures and security related aspects.
After 2 decades of professional experience I couldn’t wait anymore as I was seeing constant regression in the cybersecurity industry where the market was producing more and more cybersecurity solutions and each would differ tiny bit with one another. The crowdedness of cybersecurity solutions was also creating a weakness in the market with no particular innovativeness within solutions.
I could clearly see the need for a cybersecurity solution that will have the ability to cover wide open gaps that are currently uncovered and at the same time have multiple solutions consolidated all-in-one by eliminating the necessity of surrounding yourself with numerous solutions with tiny differences from one another. That’s where and when I decided it is time to start a project and consequently founded Dectar.
Tell me a little about Dectar, what are your flagship services and what makes the company stand out?
Dectar is developing a unique and highly innovative extended cybersecurity solution called ACSIA SOS. The uniqueness of the solution is within its detection engine. ACSIA SOS is shipped with the only open detection engine that gives the ability to its end users to add their own custom detection, response and remediation capabilities. And they can do this without being a programmer because the capabilities can be loaded/added through so-called “sigma rules” that are written in meta-language. It is essentially a description of what you need to cover, detect and remediate. The users are free and vendor independent, where we already have developed cutting-edge capabilities within the ACSIA SOS platform, but if there is anything missing the end-users can do so without our support. This is a powerful and revolutionary concept inspired by the open source community model where the breed techs are developed.
In the evolving landscape of cyber threats, how does Dectar’s approach to threat prediction and prevention set it apart from other cybersecurity firms?
Well, currently in the cybersecurity market almost every cybersecurity solution is designed to be a reactive solution, meaning, they mainly are designed to detect only when a typical problem shows up within the monitored asset which is too late. So realistically speaking, when it comes to extended end-point protection solutions there are none with capabilities and focus on predictive defense and prevention. We at the other end, with our ACSIA SOS platform, have employed the majority of our efforts on implementing prevention first approach capabilities. We do this via 2 different approaches: 1) with real-time threat intelligence feed the ability to know in advance all threats and therefore stop them at the spot by first contact (we call this predictive defense), 2) the default set of sigma rules we have are representing mainly all possible steps of a typical reconnaissance activities. Without reconnaissance it is highly unlikely that anyone would be able to attack and break into a system and that for us is the key where we focus and stop the actors while they are still trying to figure out the ways in, way before performing an attack. In order to attack you must know the full profile of what you are attacking and that’s where our primary focus is based. These 2 aspects are in addition to the unique open detection engine described earlier.
With the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures, how does Dectar ensure its solutions remain scalable and effective for both small businesses and large enterprises?
This is a very good question actually. Our platform ACSIA SOS is a multitenant platform with all components and services written in microservices and therefore scalability is one of the key points when it comes to designing the architecture of our solution. We therefore have designed ACSIA SOS to be suitable for both small medium businesses and large enterprises. For instance, just to mention some of the components, it has a SIEM, IAM, IDS, IPS, Asset Inventory, Supporting multiple OS, firewall integration and so on. When it comes to small businesses all they need is simply to protect a small number of their assets and this does not require the majority of the components they I’ve just listed, therefore from the price point of view the solution comes budget friendly and highly competitive in comparison with market prices. Secondly the solution doesn’t require for the majority of the events any human intervention where the small business don;t have tech resources anyways, and here ACSIA SOS comes very handy with its automated event handling capabilities. Differently when it comes to large enterprises they need and require all of the above mentioned components and therefore the pricing adjusts accordingly also suitable to their budgets.
Can you discuss the role of automation in Dectar’s products, particularly in reducing the workload of IT teams and enhancing real-time threat response?
Automation and reducing alert fatigue is one of the key components for us in Dectar and that’s why our platform ACSIA SOS is designed to automatically handle up to 90% of alerts automatically without requiring any human intervention. For the remaining 10% of the alerts the system provides fully comprehensive detail summarized in a very short narrative and very user friendly language so the user can take action quickly. Every time the user takes action on manually handled events the system learns from that and does not repeat the same task (this is called tuning stage), therefore automated event handling percentage increases whereas the manually handled events decrease.
Looking ahead, what future developments or innovations is Dectar focusing on to stay ahead in the cybersecurity industry?
As we mentioned before, besides cutting edge and highly innovative technology we have created, we aim constantly to consolidate, cover the needs so that you don’t surround yourself with tools that you’d be buried under and therefore can’t handle them. Our ambition is to extend the solution to cover all perimeter appliances, mobile devices which is the key in today’s market and last but not least integration of managed services such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon AWS and so on. Our roadmap is very ambitious and we are equally ambitious to create the first leading European brand cybersecurity solution that positions itself amongst biggest competitors and global players.
Prevention is the key when it comes to the future of cybersecurity in particular referring to defense solutions (not to confuse with services i.e. vuln assessment, pentest etc), in order to develop prevention focused solutions one should think like an enemy and be able to perform like an enemy. This is pretty much what we do to keep the pace with cyber attacks and as result we develop and enrich day after day ACSIA SOS.