The human is often seen as the weak link in cybersecurity. You can have all the security tooling in the world, but if attackers target people they can still get in. People in general, so also employees of organizations, need to be made aware of how to spot these types of attacks. In other words, we need Human Detection and Response (HDR) just as much as we need MDR and XDR.
KnowBe4 has been founded to address the challenges organizations have with educating their workforce on cybersecurity. During RSA Conference 2024, we sat down with founder and CEO Stu Sjouwerman.
We discuss the current state of affairs in security awareness inside organizations. A central theme for KnowBe4 nowadays is something they call adaptive human risk management. This is the foundation for a risk-based approach to cybersecurity through a human lens. You could see this as an extension of the many examples of risk-based cybersecurity approaches you can find in other areas of cybersecurity. The idea is to create a healthy security culture, alongside a good security stack.
There’s more to it than security awareness training
We don’t really discuss ‘traditional’ security awareness training all that much during our conversation. That’s more or less table stakes now, even though there’s still room for improvement on that front. However, KnowBe4 is also looking into new areas. Its acquisition of Egress is a clear example of this. Egress is a company that focuses on email security. There already was a tight integration between the two players, which will become even tighter after the acquisition.
The fact that KnowBe4 ventures into the area of e-mail security may seem a bit strange at first sight. After all, KnowBe4 never was a ‘traditional’ security technology company, right? But if you factor into the equation that email security is still the number one attack vector and that there a very strong human element to it, it actually makes perfect sense.
At the end of our conversation, we also touch on the role AI plays and is going to play in cybersecurity from a security awareness perspective. We zoom in on the rise of deepfakes. These keep getting better and better, so are harder and harder to detect for humans at the other end of them. Sjouwerman recognizes this is going to be a serious challenge, but he’s also rather optimistic that common sense (and some technology of course) will eventually win this battle too.
We hope you enjoy this new episode of Techzine Talks on Tour.
About Techzine Talks on Tour
Techzine Talks on Tour is a podcast series that Coen and Sander record while attending events all over the world. A spin-off of the successful Dutch series Techzine Talks, this new English series aims to reach new audiences. The goal is to publish a fresh episode at least every two weeks, with an increase in frequency around specific larger events with more recordings.
Techzine Talks on Tour covers a huge range of topics, as Coen and Sander attend a total of 50 to 60 events each year. Events ranging from open-source affairs like KubeCon to conferences hosted by Cisco, IBM, Salesforce and ServiceNow, to name only a few. With a lot of experience in many walks of IT life, Coen and Sander always manage to produce an engaging, in-depth discussion on general trends, but also on the underlying technology itself.
So follow Techzine Talks on Tour and stay in the know. We might just tell you a thing or two you didn’t know yet, but which might be very important for your next project or for your organization in general.
Where to find Techzine Talks on Tour?
The link in this story is from Spotify. However, Techzine Talks on Tour is available on all the well-known platforms. So you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and YouTube for example. Just search for Techzine Talks on Tour in your favorite podcast app.
Get in touch
We hope you like this new podcast series. If so, please let us know. If you have suggestions on how we can improve, we would like to hear those too. We’re also open to suggestions around specific topics, or specific people that want to appear in an episode of Techzine Talks on Tour.
Also read: ‘Good password security includes passkeys, but they are not an all-in-one solution’