Alon Bender With CLEER Security

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta on pay is the top rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at onpay. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories today on Atlanta Business Radio. We have Alon Bender with CLEER Security. Welcome, Alon.

Alon Bender: [00:00:49] Thank you so much, Lee. A pleasure to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:52] Before we get too far into things, tell us a little bit about clear security. How are you serving folks?

Alon Bender: [00:00:57] Yeah, CLEER Security is a cybersecurity startup based in Florida, and the way we serve folks is by offering a solution to help organizations better defend themselves against cyber attacks. So we developed a unique and innovative platform. It’s SAS security, a service. It’s all cloud based that allows businesses. We typically target the large organizations, allows businesses and other organizations to deal with the overwhelming number of threats that triggers alerts and be able to sort through the noise and figure out how to respond to those alerts, security alerts, cybersecurity alerts, and in a timely manner.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:48] What’s your background? Why are you the right person to take on this challenge?

Alon Bender: [00:01:53] Yeah, so my background in cybersecurity through and through, I’ve been in the cybersecurity field for my entire career. So in the last ten years, I’ve been working for some of the leading companies in the space like Trend Micro, Symantec, McAfee, Proofpoint, well-known brands. And I witnessed the problem firsthand as a security engineer. I’ve been working with different organizations on the East Coast, on the West Coast, and I learned about the problem of getting overwhelmed with security alerts, cybersecurity alerts first hand by working with a key decision maker. So just coming from that hands on field experience really gave me the right tools and background to put together this company clear security in order to come up with a solution. One of my experiences of being that working for some of those other vendors, when when you meet with the potential customers, each vendor wants to say, Hey, I have my new shiny tool that if you deploy that and that tool will block nearly 100% of threats. While the reality is really there is no tool out there that can get anywhere close to being able to fulfill that promise of stopping 100% of of threats that just doesn’t exist. And that turns into an operational nightmare, operational challenge for many organizations that it’s not if they will get rich, but it’s really when and how do you prepare for that and how do you not overstretch your limited resources as you go through that process of protecting the digital assets of your company?

Lee Kantor: [00:03:47] Now, what part of your technology allows them to kind of see the signal instead of the noise? How do you kind of discern what are the threats that they should be paying attention to and what are the ones that they could ignore?

Alon Bender: [00:04:04] Yeah, that’s a great question. So one of the other things that we notice and that definitely since COVID 19 is that the threat landscape shifted to being people focused, meaning that most of the breaches. So if you look at the latest analyst reports, they talk about 82% in the last year of breaches happened when a person was basically compromised. Someone may have gotten a PCR results and say, Hey, click here, your PCR results are arriving, it’s urgent and other types of a little bit more sophisticated type of attacks like social engineering. You may get the message from someone that you think is your manager. It’s actually not your manager asking you to do something urgent and to share with them a sensitive information like account, bank account details, etc. And those unfortunately are very effective from the bad actors perspective and are able to bypass all of the existing defenses. So what we have done with security, we basically developed and came up with a unique, innovative technology that allows us to identify how people are being targeted. And by doing so, we are now able to go and identify that signal, what we call a signal, and correlate. To look at all of the other signals that you may already have in your network in order to unveil how that bridge or how that threat is propagating or targeting your organization. By doing so, be able to respond to that very quickly.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:47] Now, you mentioned that this is a SaaS product. Is this something that’s geared primarily to kind of the Fortune 1000 companies, or is this something that’s going to be deployed to businesses of all sizes?

Alon Bender: [00:05:59] Yeah, that’s a great question. So we see different use cases. I would say the vast majority of the use cases are the large organization like 2500 employees and above. However, we do work with some MSPs. Those are managed security service providers that are typically much smaller in size and they provide they have the ability to wrap their services around our SAS offering and provide that service to their customers. So they those MSPs are typically much, much smaller. They may have dozens of employees, probably not more than that. And for them to be able to scale up without having to hire lots of resources and it’s very hard to justify that when you are a small organization while still keeping up with the growth in threats that their customers are experiencing and meeting their service level agreements or sla’s with their customers while keeping that within their profit margin. This is where clear security helps these type of service providers to be able to basically provide a force multiplier. So automate what otherwise would have been handled manually.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:17] And then so they become the user of clear on behalf of their clients.

Alon Bender: [00:07:23] Correct. So that becoming the manager of manager. So they basically manage the environment on behalf of their clients and they basically are a client of clear security, but they use clear security as a platform to really manage their customers environment using clear security.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:43] Now, at this stage you mentioned you’re a startup. At this stage. Do you have examples that you can share where this has been deployed and has kind of done what you promise?

Alon Bender: [00:07:55] Yeah. So we are actually this is exactly the process that we are going through right now. We are just releasing our first product, first release to the market. We are actually right now planning for several pilots with potential customers and we definitely would welcome the opportunity to invite anyone else to join our pilot program and just to test the system, there’s no risk. It’s out of band. There’s no risk to any business flow. It’s very safe. The setup of this type of system because it’s SAS cloud base takes minutes. So very easy to set it up and let it just run in audit mode and prove itself.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:44] And so you’re looking for partners to pilot this, whether they’re the end user or the MSPs.

Alon Bender: [00:08:50] Yes, Correct. So we are looking to add more pilots to the program. So if there are any organizations out there that are experiencing challenges when it comes to their security operations, being able to keep up with alerts, with the amount of threats, this is where we can come in and offer a pilot, basically a proof of concept to demonstrate how we are able to help them in their unique and specific environment.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:21] Now, you mentioned before that humans tend to be the weak link or can be a weak link in organizations. Is there an example you can share of something that maybe has gone undetected and that had a big impact?

Alon Bender: [00:09:35] Yeah, absolutely. So I would think about something that actually there are a number of examples that are more recent, like Uber. The Uber one is fairly recent, very recent. But I like to give another example because I was involved in that hands on, and that’s back in 2018, there was a major ransomware attack on the city of Atlanta. So if you remember, that was all over the news. And that all started basically with a simple email that contained the ransomware. And the the impact of that single attack was immense. The MARTA services were impacted a pain. All of the payment services throughout the city of Atlanta went down for a period of time. It took several good months to recover from that cyber attack. And during that time there was disruption to all city services. Anything that involved payments from parking to transportation to airport. That was a very severe event and I like to use that as an example because people not always realize that those type of cyber attacks have very real implications and they can impact our lives in a very, very real way. And the Atlanta Bridge would be probably a good example of that.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:01] And then sometimes it’s like you said, that it’s just an email that people aren’t, you know, paying super close attention to that just slip through the cracks. Somebody clicks on something and then all of a sudden now a hundred dominoes have now fallen and you’re in trouble.

Alon Bender: [00:11:18] Exactly. So what happened with the city of Atlanta is that the bad actors? It was an Iranian group that actually operated out of Germany, and they basically targeted specific people within the city. So that was a highly targeted, very sophisticated type of attack. It’s not a widespread virus that everybody sees, and it’s easier to to identify the footprint, but it was highly targeted. Those are very hard to detect, even though the method itself was very simple. So during my involvement with the city of Atlanta at the time, I helped the city to identify some of those risks and I was able to show to the heads of cybersecurity in City of Atlanta that the police department, including the police radio, were targeted by bad actors trying to bring down anything that is related to the police form the police radio, meaning just try to insert a ransomware and lock down all of the systems and all of the files that are related to the police radio to targeting. At the time, the chief of police and deputy deputy chief of police. So that was a very sophisticated orchestrated attack. And unfortunately, those happen every single day.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:43] Now, if somebody wants to learn more about clear security, maybe participate in the pilot or just learn more about the offering, what is the best way to get a hold of you or check out the website or something along those lines?

Alon Bender: [00:12:58] Yeah, I think the best way is to check out our website. Our website is clear c l e r s e c dot com. And if anyone wants to get a hold of me, they can find my details on LinkedIn. That’s alone a one vendor and we are more than happy to share more details around our programs as well as to further discuss the opportunity to offer pilots. And what are some of the benefits of running those pilots risk free. It’s we don’t charge for the pilots, so there’s really no risk, no cost, and it will give you a good visibility to into the threats that you may be missing today and more importantly, how you can automate what you may be doing today manually.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:49] Now, as you mentioned before, your startup, are you looking for funding at this point? Are you looking for talent? Is there anything else we could be doing to help you?

Alon Bender: [00:14:00] Yes. So we are in the process of actually opening our next round of funding. So we definitely are open to discussions with any VCs or investors. We do have several high profile angel investors that are behind clear security and we definitely look forward to the opportunity to to extend that that opportunity to additional investors as we are planning for our hypergrowth and and executing executing on our go to market strategy.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:39] Well, Alan, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Alon Bender: [00:14:44] Thank you. Lee, Thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:46] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

Intro: [00:14:54] Today’s episode of Atlanta Business Radio is brought to you by On pay. Built in Atlanta on pay is the top rated payroll in HR software anywhere get one month free at on paycom.