Phishing Prevention: KnowBe4 Reduces Human Error in Cybersecurity

Effectively managing the ongoing challenge of social engineering requires security awareness, training, compliance testing, and fake phishing to identify vulnerabilities.

KnowBe4 founder and CEO Stuart Sjowerman (pictured left) says his company addresses human error in cybersecurity through phishing prevention and security awareness.

Stu Sjouwerman of KnowBe4 and Tony Pepper of Egress Software talk to theCUBE about phishing prevention.

“We currently have about 70,000 customers and 60,000 users on the platform,” he says. “We're finding that advanced threat actors are getting through old security email gateways that slip through filters. That's where ICES comes in. That's where Tony comes in. ICES detects and catches very sophisticated phishing attacks. It allows us to offer the whole platform and reduce the number of vendors.”

Sjouwerman and Tony Pepper (right), co-founder and CEO of Egress Software Technologies Ltd., sat down with Dave Vellante, principal analyst at theCUBE Research, during an exclusive broadcast from SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, theCUBE, at RSA Conference. They discussed how KnowBe4 and Egress are working together to use artificial intelligence and data to address people risk management within organizations. (*Disclosure information below)

KnowBe4’s Phishing Prevention Strategy

Companies need to focus on detecting behavioral threats, especially via email, which is a top concern in an ever-changing threat landscape. Additionally, Pepper says new approaches are needed that combine AI-based threat detection with personalized training based on real threat telemetry.

“Email is really the number one threat of concern, but the threat landscape is changing. The world is beset with behavior-based threats,” Pepper said. “The days of payload-based attacks are over. They're all using very sophisticated models. Crime services is now an industry that can run very sophisticated attacks at low cost and offer them to the world. I think we need to move to a new approach.”

AI and data are crucial in detecting and preventing advanced attacks. Access to data is essential to train models, which can then be used to build better detection capabilities and filter attacks to protect customer IP, Sjouwerman noted.

“To really offer something different at scale, you need data at scale. Ultimately, what's really interesting for KnowBe4 customers is if we can get the data, the intelligence, of how to respond to and report on phishing campaigns,” Pepper said. “If you take that data and feed it into a set of models and then flip it around to build better detection, which of course is self-learning, then you have something really different.”

Below is the full video interview, which is part of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE Research's RSA Conference coverage.

(*Disclosure: KnowBe4 Inc. sponsored this segment on theCUBE. Neither KnowBe4 nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE