Cybersecurity Expert Etay Maor Joins IntSights as Chief Security Officer

Two weeks ago, after six-and-a-half years with IBM/Trusteer, I joined Intsights to take on the role of Chief Security Officer. After creating cyber training exercises and advocating for cyber response planning, it only seemed fit to focus my efforts on preparation for and prevention of attacks prior to their initiation. The field of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is dynamic and challenging, but it is the basic building block for a proactive security strategy. The opportunity to take on a strategic role and help drive IntSights’ vision of CTI is an exciting one that I am happy to take on.

The way I see it, the top reasons to join a company are great leadership and culture and a meaningful company mission. I have worked for companies that only had one of these. If the leadership or culture is not great, you end up leaving. If the mission of the company is not aligned to market needs and expectations, the company will not excel, and you end up leaving. However, when both parameters align, magic happens, and I was fortunate enough to witness this at Trusteer. When I was talking with IntSights, I saw both parameters fulfilled once again.

Leadership and Culture

From the very early stages of the recruitment process it became very clear to me that the leadership team at IntSights was not only a dedicated and professional one – they each had a real passion for delivering top-of-the-line threat intel. The mix of strong technology knowledge ­– powered by years of experience in several military units – combined with business executives who understand the market reminded me of previous successful companies I worked for. When you have such a passionate leadership team, it reflects in the company’s culture and materializes in responses to initiatives, out-of-the-box thinking, and innovation.

Mission

Proper threat intel gives companies an edge when preparing for and protecting against attacks. I love the concept of the “Pyramid of Pain”, introduced by David Bianco in 2013. If you look at the top of the pyramid you will see that the most effective way to challenge an adversary is when you know their tools, tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). One of the goals of effective CTI is to understand what you are up against so you can better detect, analyze, and remediate threats. This approach has been implemented in different frameworks such as the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This is all great – but doing this using traditional and manual tools is not enough. IntSights’ mission is to transform CTI into automated security operations, giving practitioners the tools they need, driven by huge collections from the clear, deep, and dark web.

What’s Next?

I look forward to working with our intelligence and product teams, going into the field and talking to threat intelligence practitioners, and helping companies transform to from reactive to proactive approaches to cybersecurity. To defend enterprises, we have to not only invest in incident response, but do a better job of understanding the threat landscape, what our adversary is up to, and what tools and data it is planning on using. The military refers to it as “the 7 Ps”. We refer to it as Defending Forward!