Saturday, August 27, 2016

No cure for the common cold...

Props: pbs.com
Walk through the cold and flu isle at Walmart, and you'll find hundreds of products that all tout their abilities to sooth even the most savage of symptoms -some snake oil, others not bad, but all missing one key attribute --none solve the common cold.

This analogy was told today in a conference call when a "friend of Wapack Labs" explained how we differ to a prospective customer. The friend --Bill Vajda, explained that while nobody has yet to cure the common cold, the new API is very helpful in getting raw, highly useful information into the hands of those who can actually do something with it.

He's referring to our new Cyberwatch(R) API.  We've been working hard to get it rolling. We found that we're not very good UX guys, but wanted to find a way to push intelligence --really useful intelligence, into more hands. It's in beta testing right now with a couple dozen Red Sky Alliance members. The feedback so far has been pretty consistent --typos, a bit more context, and a feature request or two, but every piece of feedback proclaimed how much they like the product.

I talked about this two(?) weeks ago. We're experimenting with different ways of selling without selling. I told my team today that I'd read a book --the Accidental Salesperson. I wasn't born able to sell. Sometimes I still wonder if I can --maybe it was simply market forces, or maybe it's just because I'm so good looking! Either way, I'd never learned a formal process for selling, and as a result have found myself reading things like "Question Based Selling", the "Accidental Salesperson", "The Challenger Sale", and just about anything I can get my hands on that'll teach me the best way to attract new customers. And here's what I found... give a customer what they want, in a way that makes it really easy to use or integrate, without the need to add extra staff (or better, make money with, or reduce current operating expenses), and it'll sell itself.

This is what we're attempting. Red Sky Alliance is a great place for those who need questions answered. Prioritization is a major issue with security folks --pushing all of those rules, signatures, behavioral patterns, and context into one HUGE box just is not going to happen.  Reading 50 page technical intelligence documents that require massive translation from techie speak to English (or, pick your language), also isn't going to work. Heck, even for those of us who like reading that stuff (like me), at some point, they all sound the same. However, everyone knows how to use a mouse, enter a domain, and read the results. There are over a hundred intelligence vendors, and over 1600 security vendors, and in every case, each one does something different, with various levels of quality... yet, nobody has yet to find a cure for humanity's most basic problem... the common cold --and delivering the right information, at the right time, to the right person, in a way in which they can take action on it, in the easiest possible way.

Stand by folks. You're in for a surprise.

In the mean time, please follow wapacklabs.blogspot.com. We're announcing every product that we author on the blog. If you really need a place to call and ask questions, we're here. Need more? Check Red Sky Alliance. Machine readable data? ThreatRecon.co offers finished indicators in a JSON output.

Until next time,
Have a great weekend!
Jeff