Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective enjoyed meeting with Yoram Salinger, CEO of Perception Point, and asking about his cybersecurity journey.
Safety Detective: What was your journey to cybersecurity and what do you love about it?
Yoram Salinger: Prior to running this venture, I was CEO of a company called Red Bend which offers remote software management for multiple industries, including cellphones and cars. At Red Bend, I looked at cybersecurity as a complementary element to our business.
After I finished working for Red Bend, which was acquired by Harman, I decided I didn’t want to stay in the automotive business so I looked for a new venture to join. When the opportunity came around to join Perception Point, I jumped at the chance to be involved in cybersecurity.
SD: What is Perception Point’s flagship product?
YS: Perception Point is a “cyber as a service” company, helping enterprises intercept content-based attacks that are trying to damage them. Content can be anything that has to do with URLs for phishing, files for malware, and text within email for business email compromise (BEC). Our product helps mitigate attacks through channels of communication, which includes email, of course, but other modes of communication as well. This includes cloud storage platforms, CRM apps, and instant messaging solutions.
Our product can protect OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox, as well as collaboration channels like Salesforce and Microsoft Teams. We see a lot of commonalities between the different threats as they are being delivered to the enterprise.
SD: What verticals use your product, or do you usually just sell to end-users?
YS: Our product services any “modern” enterprise in the sense it has cloud-based email or leveraging collaboration channels. For the readers to know, according to many surveys, enterprises today leverage between 5 and 10 different channels of communication so this can be relevant for anyone. In terms of verticals, we serve telecom companies, food and beverage companies, financial institutions, and more.
Being a new startup in this field, we see that tech companies are more open to new technologies and serve as great early adaptors, so we see a lot of tech companies using our solution.
SD: What do you feel is the worse cyberthreat today?
YS: I’ll speak about the defense, and then I’ll speak about the threat. In order to protect the enterprise in a proper way, you need to have multiple layers of defense. We protect the perimeter – the “entry points” to the stage, but there is still room for network appliances or network detection tools as well endpoints. If you are a CISO, the best way to protect your enterprise is to use several types of solutions in parallel in order to get the maximum protection. There’s no silver bullet. And moreover, once you choose a solution, I believe it should be also multi-layered in itself—for example, to have multi-layers in the solution for multiple types of attacks.
I think that as attacks are multi-layered—it starts with one kind of attack and then evolves to other elements of attack—I think that content-related attacks, which is the expertise of this company, is on the very high end of that threat. But let me give an example—email. if a hacker wants to try and attack you, he can simply try and get to your email. If he knows where you work and your name, he could try several, very simple combinations in order to get to your email. There are even websites that help you with that. Now he’s sending you emails and could send a thousand emails; he just needs to be successful once. And he can try multiple ways in – sending a malicious file or try to be more sophisticated and hide the payload in a link or other channel. Once he’s in, things like lateral movement and going through other elements of the enterprise is just a matter of time.
SD: How do you feel that the COVID-19 pandemic is going to change the face of cybersecurity for the future?
YS: I think that the most significant thing is remote working. There was a movement of remote working about 10 years ago and then it started to go back into the offices, and I think today businesses have to be conducted remotely. With COVID-19, it’s better to be equipped with solutions that protect enterprises that are working remotely, which introduces a different way of work from the accessibility and the ease of gaining access to enterprise assets.