In today’s world of advanced cyber threats, security professionals need to implement new methods and strategies to gain the upper hand in protecting their business. Thinking like an attacker isn't really good enough. However, incorporating hacker methodologies & tools will give security teams the situational awareness and intelligence needed to respond quickly to new & previously unknown threats. The security industry is changing. For some, it’s a good thing, and for others, they're watching their antiquated ways of failing to prevent exploits become irrelevant for smart security teams.
Why? For starters, attackers are eating traditional technologies for breakfast. Hackers are more sophisticated, and already have volumes of intel on you and your company, including the technologies deployed to defend your infrastructure. Second, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to simply rely on ‘building a bigger wall,’ because you cannot defend against persistency.
A fundamentally different security mindset is needed to address well-organized, well-funded, and sophisticated attackers who focus squarely on circumventing your defenses. This includes using attacker technology and tools against the attackers, incorporating the same stealth techniques that attackers use into your defenses, leveraging forensics at the point of attack to understand what you are dealing with, and using analytics to understand attacker behavior to draw conclusions on specific areas of your systems that require attention.
Michael Davis, Chief Technology Officer, CounterTack
As CounterTack's CTO, Michael Davis is responsible for driving the advancement of CounterTack's revolutionary endpoint security platform, as well as leveraging his visionary approach to push defenders ahead of attackers. Davis has earned a reputation as one of the nation's leading authorities on information technology. The list of organizations that rely on his council includes AT&T, Sears, Exelon, and the US Department of Defense. Prior to CounterTack, Davis was President of External IT, a national managed IT services and cloud services provider that focuses on unifying the business IT experience. In 2005, he founded Savid Technologies, an IT security consulting firm. He led Savid to be the 23rd fastest growing company in Chicago as measured by Inc. magazine, and by 2010, Savid was ranked 611 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America. Prior to Savid, he served as senior manager of global threats at McAfee, where he led a team of researchers investigating confidential and cutting-edge security analysis. As an entrepreneur he was voted one of the “Top 25 under 25” by BusinessWeek, semi-finalist of the Ernst and Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” award, and a “Web 2.0 Wonderkid” for his online marketing capabilities. Davis is an contributing author to the top selling computer security book, Hacking Exposed, as well as Hacking Exposed: Malware and Rootkits, and he is a frequent contributor to industry and business publications including InformationWeek and Dark Reading. He regularly speaks at noted industry conferences including Black Hat, Interop, SuperStrategies, and InfoSecWorld.
