OpenText’s Paul Reid on Preventing Next Generation Cyberthreats

hi I'm James Maguire here at the RSA conference with Paul Reed Global head of threat intelligence at open text Paul thanks for talking with us today thanks for having with us today all right so I want to talk about some of the key Cy security threats the companies are facing but first please tell us what openex does and how does openex to serve its clients so openex is a $6 billion a year Revenue company we have a historical background in information security management and that really makes us a unique company that perspective understanding Information Management on where you keep your data how you access your data store your data the importance of the data if you don't know what you have you can't protect it so I think for us the advantage we have over other companies is that information management background you put on top of that our cyber security products now we know where your data is the importance of it we can help you protect it better we're going to give you better cyber resilience by combining those two together into a single offering to you and as a company we can give better coverage than you get everywhere else so you talk about something called Next Generation threats what do you refer to when you when you refer to Next Generation threats so as we've seen companies move to the cloud uh leverage Supply chains more look at Federated identity the threat actors have paid attention to that so they're really thinking about it more holistically on how can we focus on you and the type of business you do the type of things you use in your business against you so for example if I can compromise your supply chain then I can in indirectly influence your ability to do business or conduct operations or whatever it is right and the type of threats they're using are very different than what we saw before they're a lot more coordinated they're spending more time doing reconnaissance they're spending more time doing open source Intelligence on you to understand again who you're using so for example a lot of companies have done a really good job managing their identities right we had identity sprawl for a long time but now we've got centralized Federated identity that's been really great right easier to manage all those good type of things but at the same time for threat actors they look at that as a single point of access now right so now if I want access to your information in a CRM or in some other system I don't have to go compromise three or four different locations if I can compromise your Federated ID then I have access to everything so we're really seeing the threat actors focusing on that focusing their attacks on that and it's a really different way of thinking about cyber security I think the question that companies are really struggling with is how do we protect ourselves against the cyber attacks what advice would you give to companies so I think one of the things we've done a great job on especially most recently is we always recognize the importance of the endpoint right the the laptops the desktops the servers because that's where the attackers want to get to we've done a wonderful job with EDR and other products like our webw products zix um and be able to protect that what we're seeing now with these next generational threats is we need to sort of looking at Global adversary signals we need to understand what our adversaries are doing in terms of attacks against you so we're looking at the concept of adversary signal threat intelligence a little bit different than traditional threat intelligence where traditional threat intelligence says here what the adversaries are doing here's the type of ttps they're using here's where they're operating those here the verticals are focusing on so as an organization it's really good general information for me to know but it's not specific to me with our adversary signal threat intelligence we tell you this is what's happening to you now so you don't have to guess am I being packed by this adversary or different one we're saying this is the adversary that is attacking you today so when we do that we give you additional visibility so the big thing is we want to look beyond our borders right so again we great job EDR looking inside now we got to look out and so what we're asking companies to do is work with us to Def find what we call a covered space a protected area of their company that encompasses just not their main corporate but also things like do we have content in a Content delivery Network do we have content in a hyperscaler that's where the attackers are looking to attack you now they're going after all your presences just not your corporate presences so with our new product side DNA we Define a covered space that encompasses all that so we can see the incoming and outgoing adversary signals so you have a good idea what's taking place so if I'm hearing you correctly the fact that companies have a more of a distributed architecture like the cloud like the home base that creates more attack points it certainly does right um business has to continue right we really don't to some extent have control over our attack surface right we have to conduct business but it's incumbent upon us to understand what that looks like so with side DNA we're looking at those global adversary signals we there's other companies that do a tax service management they do a great job of that that's not what we do we're actually looking at the signals that are coming into and out of your coverage space to let you know what's happening one of the things we're hearing from companies one of the side benefits of that besides just simply knowing your adversaries what type of attacks are taking place if we think about the level of patching a large Enterprise needs to do every day every week every month right there's only so much time money energy and effort they can put into it with Sid we can tell you this is the adversary who's targeting you with these tools and techniques leveraging these CBS and exploits so now as a company I can take and prioritize that patching over maybe something else more specific that's right we're going to help increase your cyber resiliency all right let's drill down into the openex product offering what what are the key features of what Opex does for clients so we have products that span all the way from small medium business Enterprise all the way up to large Enterprises we have products that help protect you on your endpoint with things like web and email Z we have our bright Cloud product which is used by a number of OEM vendors for web gateways and firewalls and then as we move up the stock we have things like net IQ we have fortify on demand and then of course the products I'm more actively involved with our arite intelligence and of course what we're announcing this week side DNA all right let's look to the future of cyber security I mean when you look in your crystal ball what what do you see evolving in the next oh two to four years and and most importantly how can companies get ready for that now it goes back to a lot of fundamental things we've talked about right patching it's taking care of your credentials it's really the DNA of our company being an information management company know your data know where your data is know the value of your data where it's stored what's inside of it and then choose the right things to protect it with right you'd like to have a holistic approach to your cyber security but you got to know yourself first when we look at where cyber threats are going obviously generative AI it's having a big impact on that and actually in our recent threat report let just come out we talk about how generative AI is being used to make fishing and spear fishing much more effective right the volume that they can generate on that is significantly higher we saw that this year we saw volumes go up you know uh we we quarantined 7.7 billion emails last year we see 700,000 unknown files a day we're going to see more and more attacks I think what we're going to see is more coordination between thread actors they work really well together they share a lot of information together and it's only going to increase right as we move to the cloud and we see that we get better at protecting ourselves there the threat actors are really going to look for a softer side and today that's our supply chains so they're really going after them we've done a number of what we call situational reports with our sidna product for customers where we showed them that they've done a really good job protecting themselves the adversaries are not able to Target them effectively but yet when we expand to their supply chain and we look at their suppliers we see that that's where the adversaries are focusing right I may be a billion dollar company but I may depend upon a supply chain of small medium businesses of 50 less people they're not have the same cyber resources as I do right but the sidea product actually allows that Enterprise to extend that cyber protection to their to their supply chain and help them understand the threats they're seeing and then in turn better manage their own threats that are coming into their organization and be able to protect themselves right if I can compromise one of your suppliers I you may have a trust relationship with them already you may just naturally accept their traffic through emails sure and I may never know as the sewer of that that you've been compromised when we put the side DNA covered space over that I then get visibility that you know what maybe there was an attack by a threat actor who's going to leverage an email exploit against me so visibility is going to be key and abis threat intelligence is going to be absolutely vital for that I wonder if we ever get to a point in the future say five years from now wherever where you know it's really we are quote unquote done with cyber security it's really solved the Ford is in place we don't need to wor about it so much will that day ever arrive is that you're optimistic so I think that as long as we have adversaries and the adversaries want to harm us we're never going to get to that perfect point I think we can make it a lot harder for our adversaries by doing some fundamental things right patch separation of Duty credential management all the fundamental things we've talked about encryption at rest encryption of em motion things like that but to get yourself the visibility you need to see those threats coming use things like AV AER signal or

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