On Thursday, an old friend from my enlisted Coast Guard days stopped in for a visit. We'd left the Guard at about the same time; he went to work for IBM and stayed there for 21 years to become an expert salesman. I went to Navy OCS and became an intelligence officer and a professional analyst.For the first half hour in my office, we walked through our offerings. I could see in his expressions that he was thinking critically about what I was telling him. All the while, he kept asking me "So what"? "So what?" "So what?" This is the same thing that I do to my analysts when they present me with an idea for a paper.. I "so what?" them until we can't "so what?" any more to get to the root of why anyone would want to read that piece of analysis. In this case, the tables were turned on me. He kept saying "you have to make it simple". You're selling the steak when you really need to explain, and make them sense, the feeling of sitting in the restaurant, and the first cut into that perfectly done filet. He told me that ours was some of the best intelligence he'd seen in the space, but our messaging was complicated and didn't represent our product line as well as it should.
Yesterday I received an email today from a company (a $3 billion per year company). We'd been demo'ing our firehose of intelligence. He explained that they created their Infosec team small by design. They told me that they have an MSSP that handles their firewalls, and outsource other parts of their world to keep their internal team lean and mean. They'd considered our services but felt it was overkill for what they need.
We sell lots of things, but they all boil down to two primary lines —you can do it yourself (DIY) using our tools, or we can do it for you. In either case, you get access to Red Sky Alliance where you can share information, ask questions, and compare notes.
The DIY approach consists of accounts in our Cyber Threat Analysis Center (CTAC for short) —a place where we've loaded up a SaaS environment with suite of amazing analytic tools ranging from Elastic to CyberChef and H20. We've got Zeppelin, and GitBook/GitHub for sharing code and documentation. On the backend we've loaded our intelligence, pre-built some queries, and essentially, built an expert level sandbox for highly skilled analysts who love twisting and turning data. DIYers LOVE this offering —it puts everything they need at their fingertips. In fact, I joke and tell people that I'm following Bloomberg's business model! We supply the data, tools, and training. You supply the brain cells.
At the other end of the offering, we've had several companies who tell us "we don't want to invest in intelligence", or, "we've already spent enough money on infrastructure", or, "we've intentionally kept our team small". In those cases, we become their intelligence and analysis team, supplying inputs into their Information Security, Fraud, Physical, Risk and Intellectual Property teams.
So Jeff (my Coastie turned IBM friend) looked at me and and asked "How much would it cost if you sent me a weekly report, specifically for me and my company?
I gave him a price. That's easy I said. We do it all the time.
Back to my $3 billion per year prospect —They also told me that they couldn't handle intelligence inputs into their security team —they leave that to their MSSP and a small team. The head guy didn't want to invest in the DIY program. But, on more than one occasion we'd given them both compromises in their supply chain, and internal networks —things their MSSP should have seen, but missed. And when we did, in every case (three times), the analyst that we presented with our findings, acknowledged them in a positive way, once publicly.
I'd made a fundamental error.
I'd been trying to sell them on DIY, when whey they really wanted and needed, was option 2.
We're hearing this more and more… There's to much intelligence. We don't have a good way to process it. We're not interested in building an intelligence team. We rely on our MSSP for that. Or maybe it's what my old pal Jerome calls the 'green light syndrome' (where security people watch for the green light, and if it's green, they're good). Not everyone wants to grill their own steak. Maybe they just want to pay a little more to sit at a nice restaurant and have a perfectly cooked filet mignon be placed in front of them.
Wapack Labs is working hard to make this ridiculously simple. In the next few weeks, we'll be launching a tool to drip out the most important stuff -in chewable byte sized chunks. We've assigned primary analysts to each of our customers as their go-to analyst. And we've begun sending out reports and ad-hoc warnings. If you still want to be a DIY'er, please! By all means! But if you're one of those "we need it simple" types of folks, you're going to love this.
Interested in having a look? Check out wapacklabs.com, or sign up here for more information.
BT
For those affected in Texas, we're thinking of you. As of this morning when I last watched the news, 39 dead, not to mention untold numbers of folks displaced or stranded. We're thinking of, and praying for you.
Until next week.
Jeff
