Beyond Passwords: Leveraging Identity Insight to Create Secure Experiences

In this episode of Mistaken Identity, Matt interviews Dan Schiappa, Chief Product Officer at Arctic Wolf. At Arctic Wolf, Dan works to increase the effectiveness of the cybersecurity industry through security operations.

Today, Dan explains why identity is more important now than ever, and how security experts need to think ahead to solve problems in our constantly changing tech landscape. He also talks about using AI to sort data, fight bad actors, and prepare for a more challenging security future.

Key Quotes:

“For us in security, sometimes we get lost in thinking about where security is gonna be in the future instead of just thinking about where it and general society is gonna be in the future. And then how we build security mechanisms to protect that. The two key things are to solve a problem for your customer and also be out there looking for problems that they don't know they have yet.”

“Identity is important now, if not more important than it ever has been. It's always been a big aspect of security. We used it for our authentication and access control and things of that nature, but now we can ascertain so much valuable information from the user for attacking things like insider threat for compromised credentials, and being able to enable things that help security, like zero trust.”

“One of the things that really needs to happen is education of the end user. Saying 'Hey, you should have multi factor authentication turned on. And you should know that if you get a prompt that says you're trying to authenticate and it's not you, don’t hit Yes just to make the prompt go away.”

“I’ll just take every bit of data I can get. And the problem is you get what I call data drunk. You just have so much data. You really can't make any sense out of it. And AI is not only great at detecting things, it's smart at telling you what you don't need as well. And so you can really focus on collecting the data that's important, that will help drive those models and help drive those detections.”

“Real security is using multiple elements to drive an authentication, not just a fingerprint, but you start to factor in a whole bunch of different pieces of intelligence to know that it's indeed the right user. That's where passwordless will get real. Right now it is mostly convenience factors. We still have work to do to get rid of those passwords.”

“I think in this ever-changing landscape, [security] just seems to be getting harder every year. Not easier. And I think the good news is for the most part, the defensive companies are keeping up. But it’s harder and harder to keep up because the adversaries are getting smarter and smarter. And generative AI and other AI methods at the hands of mal-intended people is just gonna make the landscape even harder.”

Time stamps:

00:43 - What’s your identity?

03:05 - Keeping customers at the center

08:50 - Why identity is important right now

18:40 - Leveraging AI for protections

26:05 - Build vs. buy

33:40 - Future Thinking

41:05 - Quick hits

Links:

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