Summary:

In this 111th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host welcomes J. Paul Haynes, President and COO of eSentire, to talk about evolving cybersecurity threats, the challenges of the mid-size market, and more. 

Episode Highlights: 

● 00:58: – eSentire is disrupting the way cybersecurity is managed. 

● 03:28: – There are over 70 categories of cybersecurity companies because the problem keeps changing as technology evolves. 

● 05:00: – eSentire serves mid-size companies with between 200-2,000 employees. 

● 07:05: – Instead of offering certain features, eSentire sees themselves as a threat partner, making decisions about traffic and servers as if they were an employee of your company. 

● 09:01: – eSentire was one of the first to solve security issues with hedge funds. 

● 10:20: – A security breach with a hedge fund would be not just a reputational hit, but could end the business. 

● 11:17: – A security analyst can identify the details of a threat as it happens, isolate it, and use that model as an update for all of their subscribers and are able to shut it down across their network. 

● 16:55: – When a threat is detected, eSentire has eyes on it in under 1 minute and has usually completed its investigation within 10 minutes. 

● 19:05: – They see somewhere between 7-10 million raw events every day, and of every 1,000 of those only about 1 needs to be investigated by a human. 

● 21:48: – Half of the threats they see every day are unique to their network. 

● 22:50: – When J started in this business 10 years ago, threats were measured in the 6 week range, and now it’s in the 5-7 day range, but eventually it will be down to minutes and seconds and the threat detection industry has to be able to keep pace. 

● 23:30: – These breaches are mostly committed by opportunistic criminals, so you look at means, motive, and opportunity. 

● 25:45: – As quantum computing becomes mainstream, we will first have to worry about state secrets of smaller nation-states. 

● 28:39: – Most of these efforts are information-gathering rather than disruptive. 

● 30:10: – A majority of data breaches are from self-inflicted wounds like clicking a link in a trusted partner’s email that you don’t know is compromised. 

● 31:21: – If J could change one thing, it would be to flip the industry so that security conversations are had on the business’s terms instead of the tech terms to help with overall understanding of stakes. 

● 34:39: – J’s biggest challenge has always been recruiting the talent he needs. 

● 36:36: – What excites J the most is that there’s always a new challenge. 

3 Key Points 

1. The needs of cybersecurity are constantly evolving as technology evolves. 

2. Many cyber threats seem innocuous and go unnoticed because they are 

information-gathering rather than disruptive. 

3. AI improves how quickly a threat can be identified but we still need humans to verify and 

respond to those threats. 

Tweetable Quotes: 

● “We will be your threat management partner... We will make decisions as though we were one of your employees. We will actually block traffic and we will shut down servers and then we will tell you what we were just able to stop.” –J. Haynes 

● “The notion of relying exclusively on protective controls as the 100% solution is naive. They will fail, so you have to get competent at detecting when they fail and be able to react to that in a timely fashion.” –J. Haynes 

● “No matter how good the AI gets, bad guys have AI too. They have cloud storage, they have all of the things that we have without any of the friction of rules of business or regulations. I often say, while they are morally corrupt, they are phenomenally gifted.” –J. Haynes 

Resources Mentioned: 

● Jason Pereira’s Website | Facebook | LinkedIn 

● Fintech Impact 

● eSentire Website 

● J. Paul Haynes Linkedin 

Full Transcript

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