Q&A With SharkStriker

Aviva Zacks Aviva Zacks

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

SharkStriker: SharkStriker’s founders come from a rich cybersecurity background with over 2 decades of experience. During their journey as cybersecurity experts, they have worked with and for multiple global cybersecurity vendors across services and solutions for firewall, endpoint security, compliance, cloud security, etc. While working with these international vendors, they found numerous ground challenges, leading to several cyber impacts on businesses, especially the SMBs.

The first challenge they witnessed was the lack of awareness and budget constraints for small businesses. Although the cybersecurity needs for both SMBs and enterprises are almost identical, the budgets vary broadly, preventing the former from leveraging enterprise-level security. On the other hand, despite investing a large amount on best-of-breed security solutions, none of the businesses are completely protected from cyber threats.

The next challenge is that no one-stop comprehensive solution provider can cater to all security needs like providing the right tools, frequent audits, 24/7 monitoring, incident response, compliance management, user awareness training, etc.

Also, most MSP partners and IT resellers have a basic understanding of cybersecurity. Still, when it comes to configuring the solutions as per the industry best practices, they too lack the expertise. Not all of these MSPs have the resources, skills, and expertise to monitor security solutions 24/7 and respond immediately to any suspicious activities for prevention. Hence, due to the lack of expertise (people), industry best practices (processes), and infrastructure (platform or technology), these IT resellers or MSPs are unable to deliver all-encompassing security, especially to SMBs with budget constraints.

The founders then started SharkStriker, a comprehensive cybersecurity services providing firm with a global presence. Our core mission is to provide enterprise-level security to small businesses so that they can leverage the best tools, technologies, and services for optimal security and that too within a good budget.

To achieve this mission, we are empowering IT resellers and MSPs with our white-labeled services, making it a win-win situation for them as well. Implementing and leveraging our services doesn’t require any upfront investments as we handle everything for our clients. We work as an extended cybersecurity arm providing 24/7 SOC expertise and security platforms like SIEM, EDR, and XDR using our ORCA philosophy.

SD: What is the main service your company offers?

SharkStriker: SharkStriker offers all-around cybersecurity services that cover all the aspects of prevention from threats, but our primary services include:

  • Managed Detection and Response: SharkStriker’s MDR is not just any other MDR; we go beyond the traditional security measures to cover the entire attack life cycle. The protection of our MDR is mapped with MITRE Att&ck Model. Besides the standard capabilities of an MDR, it comes with multiple extended cybersecurity capabilities such as an autonomous prevention engine with cloud connectivity, automated attack visualization and root cause analysis, and automated response procedure for real-time and machine-accelerated threat detection, investigation, and response.
  • Managed SIEM Service: Through our Managed SIEM service, we help businesses gain a complete 360° visibility across the IT infrastructure. The service is managed by leading experts and backed by a 24/7 SOC team. Our cybersecurity team monitors all the logs and events round-the-clock to analyze suspicious behaviors and raise alerts. Besides continuous monitoring, it also helps with achieving compliance, as most compliances require monitoring and storing logs for at least a year. It also helps better understand the business infrastructure and adversaries used to penetrate it for developing robust preventative security.
  • Security Auditing and VAPT: Security is not an implement once and forget thing. Timely audits and assessments are crucial to maintaining high security. Our cybersecurity experts can conduct thorough assessments to find out potential loopholes and also help mitigate them. Additionally, we are experts at simulating real-life attacks on a system as part of penetration tests to find and eliminate any systematic flaws.
  • 24/7 SOC as a Service: Cyber adversaries don’t have any specific work hours. Hence, it is essential to monitor a network 24/7. Our SOC experts work round-the-clock for active monitoring and threat response to ensure real-time threat intelligence and correlation rules aligned with current cybersecurity risks. The 24/7 SOC as a Service collects security triages from all the applications and tools across the business environment. This enables us to build security orchestration for preventative and event-based threat hunting.

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

SharkStriker: Businesses have multiple cybersecurity needs ranging from assessments and auditing to 24/7 monitoring to compliance to user awareness, real-time threat hunting, incident response, and much more. But there is no one-stop cybersecurity solution provider that can cater to all business needs through a robust platform. Hence, businesses usually rely on IT resellers and MSPs for this purpose. However, even they have to rely on multiple solutions for providing such services, making it hectic for them to manage everything. We offer end-to-end white-labeled services to such IT resellers and MSPs from a single robust platform. Our white-labeled services provide them with branded portal under their brand name, security experts for assistance, dashboards, weekly and monthly reports, and an incident response portal.

Moreover, our unique ORCA platform, built with an adversarial mindset, helps us stand out from the competition. The ORCA stands for Observe, Response, Compliance, and Awareness. Today’s cyber attackers are the predators like sharks, and the only thing that sharks fear is ORCA or the killer whale. While most current solutions in the cybersecurity domain are for specific issues, our ORCA platform acts as the single platform the covers everything right from prevention, detection, and response to compliance and employee awareness. Thus, we provide single-stop, comprehensive cybersecurity to our customers, thereby delivering the maximum security ROI.

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

SharkStriker: As the cybersecurity landscape changes rapidly and the numbers increase significantly, every cyber threat is worst for businesses. However, social engineering is the biggest cybersecurity threat facing businesses. It is a form of manipulation technique used to exploit human error. According to Verizon and Cisco, over 90% of breaches were due to spear-phishing attacks, a form of social engineering. In social engineering, the attackers enact to be someone else and lure employees or humans, in general, to expose data, spread malware infection or give access to restricted systems. Thus, it becomes easy for the adversaries to laterally move in such scenarios as someone trusted by the company exposes the data.

Another major upward steep is seen in ransomware, especially since the pandemic. As most companies have embraced remote workforce and BYOD culture post-Covid-19, there have been huge ransomware incidents, making it the 3rd most popular type of malware used for breaches. People have started using personal devices for accessing business-critical systems and data. Most personal devices are usually less secure compared to business systems and devices. Cyber adversaries have taken this as an opportunity to easily penetrate into personal devices and later access business systems to deploy malware.

The core reason behind both these cyber threats is unawareness among employees. Most attacks result from human error as the employees are not aware of the ongoing cyberattack tactics. Hence, through our cybersecurity solutions, we also use live simulated attacks to increase awareness among employees and make our customers’ organizations safer.

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.