Managing Risk is More Important Now Than Ever

February 20, 2018 3759 Views Gabriel Torok

I just read the Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q1 2018.

Forrester reminds us all that “Risk and compliance management is more important than ever, thanks to the increasingly intangible nature of business value and the growing risk of violating customer trust.”

The report evaluated 14 leading GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) vendors: ACL, Enablon, IBM, LogicManager, MetricStream, Nasdaq, NAVEX Global, Riskonnect, RSA, Rsam, SAI Global, SAP, ServiceNow, and Thomson Reuters. What was most interesting to me is that 50% of these leading providers use PreEmptive’s application protection tools as part of their own strategy.

With software applications driving new business models, corporate reputations are increasingly at risk and regulatory fines are skyrocketing. Now is an ideal time to implement a comprehensive risk management strategy.

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For development teams, adding Dotfuscator to a build pipeline can often seem like a challenge; the value it adds is mostly gained by the surrounding business, and the cost of adding it is mostly borne by the development team. We understand that constraint, which is why we focus on making Dotfuscator as easy to integrate and maintain as possible. If you're a long-time user of Dotfuscator, you've probably experienced that - release after release of painless upgrades. That's our "first do no harm" philosophy in action.

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Malicious actors — like any thieves — live by a simple rule: If the front door is locked, break the window.

It’s why threats like fileless malware and crypto-jacking have seen substantial gains over last few years. It’s why — despite increasing employee education and IT training — hackers are still hooking phish by developing more sophisticated and authentic-looking email spoofs. Cybercriminal communities, meanwhile, continue to grow on the dark web, allowing attackers to share info, purchase exploit kits and identify potential targets.

What does this mean for CISOs? That typical defense efforts are being outpaced as familiar attack vectors are replaced with non-traditional threats. But it’s not all bad news; here are three questions every CISO needs to ask to help close the doors, bolt the windows and leave hackers out in the cold.

Gabriel, you have been in the security industry for over 2 decades. You have seen many different tools and services. Why create a company around something as specific as obfuscation and in-app protection?

Our customers build a lot of really innovative apps that enable their users and customers to do new and cool things. These apps frequently run on untrusted client computers/devices and they control access to customer’s sensitive data or critical devices.

And after all the effort of designing, building, debugging, and deploying their applications, the last thing they want is for an attacker to steal their work or use it to look for vulnerabilities to break into their system.

Long ago, we built a Java code optimizer, but it became clear to us that our customer cared more about the obfuscation effects of the optimization than the actual performance improvement. That is when we really began to focus on app protection. First with Java, then .NET, Android, iOS, Xamarin, JavaScript, etc.

Gartner calls In-App Protection “crucial” in their July 2019 Market Guide for In-App Protection In-App Protection. The guide’s summary advises security and risk management leaders to “take due care in protecting their application clients” in order to avoid “security failure.”

This raises the question – what constitutes “due care?” Obviously, no development organization looks to recklessly expose their applications or sensitive data to attack or compromise. On the other hand, over-engineered (or poorly engineered) security controls can quickly lead to excessive development costs, performance and quality issues, and, ultimately, unacceptable user experiences. While terms and terminology may vary, there is broad consensus on how to best define “due care” for any given application/user scenario.

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Gabriel, you have been in the security industry for over 2 decades. You have seen many different tools and services. Why create a company around something as specific as obfuscation and in-app protection?

The Secret to Effective In-App Protection

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