Fishtech Hires Fortune 1 CISO and establishes Fishtech Group Innovation Center
Former WalMart CISO will lead cybersecurity tech and talent center in NW Arkansas
Kansas City, MO (Feb. 13, 2019) — Fishtech Group, a next-generation leader in cybersecurity, announces it has hired Kerry Kilker to serve as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer. Most recently, Kilker was Senior VP and CISO for Walmart Technology, where he established and operated a world-class cybersecurity program for the world’s largest retail organization.
At Fishtech, Kilker will be responsible for driving internal and customer-facing initiatives related to security, governance, and compliance. Additionally, he will run and oversee a newly created Fishtech Group Innovation Center in Northwest Arkansas.
“I am excited to join the nationally recognized Fishtech team with its history of building large, fast-growth companies in the cybersecurity space,” says Kilker. “Being part of such an entrepreneurial team is a career high, and I’m especially pleased with this opportunity to bring leading edge cybersecurity resources to the Northwest Arkansas region.”
“Kerry is an icon in our space,” says Gary Fish, CEO and Founder of Fishtech Group. “Having worked at the ‘Fortune 1’ for 30-plus years, Kerry brings a wealth of knowledge from his viewpoint of customer wants and needs. His hard-won perspective will help tailor our service and technology offerings to serve today’s heavily burdened CISOs. With Kerry’s guidance, we expect to accelerate Fishtech’s triple digit growth trajectory in the years to come.”
The Fishtech Group Innovation Center will bring cybersecurity training, technology, and resources to Northwest Arkansas. The center is designed to bridge the resource and talent gap in high growth areas of the country – a gap that is often overlooked yet increasingly critical to enterprise success. In collaboration with local corporations, communities, and municipalities, Fishtech will bring much needed cybersecurity talent and attention to these smaller cities featuring concentrations of high-growth companies with growing cybersecurity needs.
About Fishtech Group
Fishtech is a data-driven cybersecurity services provider for any computing platform. We identify gaps and solutions to help organizations minimize risk, maintain compliance, and increase efficiency. Based in Kansas City, Fishtech is the flagship entity of Fishtech Group, which includes the Security-as-a-Service division CYDERES, and the security analytics firm Haystax of McLean, VA. Fishtech venture partners include Perch Security of Tampa, FL, and Foresite of Overland Park, KS. Visit https://fishtech.group/ or contact us at info@fishtech.group.
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How to Mitigate Insider Threat
The best insider threat mitigation programs often use combinations of analytic techniques to assess and prioritize workforce risk, according to a recent report by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA). For example, probabilistic models can be usefully enhanced with rules-based triggers and machine learning algorithms that detect anomalies, creating a powerful user behavior analytics (UBA) capability for government and private enterprises alike.
Haystax Technology’s Vice President for UBA Customer Success, Tom Read, was a key member of INSA’s Insider Threat Subcommittee, which produced the report, and he recently summarized its findings in an article for Homeland Security Today.
“Organizations confronting malicious, negligent and unintentional threats from their trusted insiders must make important policy, structural and procedural decisions as they stand up programs to mitigate these burgeoning threats,” Read noted. “On top of that, they must choose from a bewildering array of insider threat detection and prevention solutions.”
INSA’s report, An Assessment of Data Analytics Techniques for Insider Threat Programs, provides a framework to help government and industry decision-makers evaluate the merits of different analytic techniques. Six primary techniques are identified, Read says, along with detailed explanations of each and guidance on how insider threat program managers can determine the types of tools that would most benefit their organizations. The techniques are: rules-based engines; correlation and regression statistics; Bayesian inference networks; machine learning (supervised); machine learning (unsupervised); and cognitive and deep learning.
Read summarized the report’s assessment of each technique in greater detail, as well as its four primary conclusions — that insider threat program managers should:
- Integrate data analytics into the risk management methodology they use to rationalize decision-making;
- Assess which techniques are likely to be most effective given the available data, their organizational culture and their levels of risk tolerance;
- Evaluate the myriad software tools available that most effectively evaluate data using the preferred approach; and
- Assess the human and financial resources needed to launch a data analytics program.
Click here to read the full Homeland Security Today article.
Fishtech Group Completes Acquisition of Haystax
Cybersecurity firm’s capabilities include UBA and Public Safety and Security
Kansas City, MO (July 13, 2018) — Fishtech Group (FTG) has completed its acquisition of Haystax (previously Haystax Technology), an advanced security analytics and risk management solutions provider, as a wholly owned entity under the FTG umbrella. The acquisition extends the cybersecurity firm’s capabilities in new markets including User Behavior Analytics (UBA) and Public Safety and Security. Fishtech is investing heavily in taking the new venture to market in the commercial enterprise space.
Announced in May, the acquisition solidifies the cybersecurity solutions firm’s relationship with Haystax, which had been a Fishtech Venture Group partner since 2016.
The new entity furthers Fishtech’s mission of data-driven security solutions while extending Haystax’s customer reach beyond its roots in homeland security and public safety. Gary Fish, CEO and Founder of Fishtech, serves as CEO and Pete Shah will be Chief Operations Officer. Haystax will retain its base in McLean, Virginia.
“This is a 1+1=3 scenario in that our combined capabilities are so far beyond what either entity could accomplish alone,” said Fish. “We’re expanding the sales force and the brand message to a national scale. We’re already gaining traction into enterprise accounts nationally.”
Haystax’s Constellation analytics platform flexes to and delivers a wide array of advanced security analytics and risk management solutions that enable rapid understanding and response to virtually any type of cyber or physical threats. Based on a patented model-driven approach that applies multiple artificial intelligence techniques, it reasons like a team of expert analysts to detect complex threats and prioritize risks in real time at scale for more effective protection of critical systems, data, facilities and people.
“The Constellation platform has proven itself to be a versatile and effective platform for insider threat, security operation center (SOC) automation, and public safety,” said Fish. “We look forward to working closely with the Haystax team to further enhance those capabilities and develop other applications for its use.”
About Haystax
Founded in 2012, Haystax is a leading security analytics platform provider based in McLean, Virginia.
About Fishtech Group
Fishtech delivers operational efficiencies and improved security posture for its clients through cloud-focused, data-driven solutions. Fishtech is based in Kansas City, Missouri. Visit https://fishtech.group/ or contact us at info@fishtech.group.
McLean cyber company whose tech is used by the NFL is being acquired
By Robert J. Terry – Senior Staff Reporter, Washington Business Journal
Key story highlights:
- Fishtech Group is buying McLean-based Haystax Technology and will take the company to market in the commercial enterprise space.
- “People spend a lot of time and money securing their data but they’re not using their data to drive security,” said CEO Gary Fish.
- Haystax’s security analytics platform has been used by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Football League.
A Kansas City holding company’s deal to acquire McLean-based Haystax Technology is a bid to bring advanced analytics and automation to commercial and government cybersecurity markets.
Fishtech Group plans to make Haystax a wholly owned subsidiary and invest heavily in taking the new venture to market in the commercial enterprise space, particularly heavily regulated industries such as finance and health care. It’s also planning to enhance Haystax’s presence in federal, state and local government markets beyond its roots in homeland security and public safety.
Haystax’s security analytics platform has been used by the U.S. Department of Defense to help track terrorists. The National Football League used the platform to monitor suspicious activity and prevent cyber and physical threats at the Super Bowl. And the state of California used the technology to crunch data from earthquake sensors to predict when earthquakes might occur.
Fishtech CEO Gary Fish said the Haystax mission fits well with his company’s push to use big data, sophisticated analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to disrupt the security integration market, where the big vendors are focused on-premises and in networks with well-defined perimeters. In an age of cloud computing and thousands of mobile endpoints, there’s no longer really a perimeter for an organization’s data, but there are reams of insights in that data to enhance an overall security posture.
“People spend a lot of time and money securing their data but they’re not using their data to drive security. If you look in the data you can find what’s causing your security issues potentially,” Fish told me Wednesday. “Haystax brings in large amounts of log data and system data and personnel data and by letting algorithms, the machine learning, the artificial intelligence, by letting the machines sift through this they can see much more than a human could possibly find in the data.”
The two companies know each other well. Fishtech invested $4 million in Haystax in December 2016. When it came time to consider additional investment, Fish decided the better course was to acquire the company, which has about $10 million in annual revenue. He wouldn’t disclose the transaction’s terms but said he expects Haystax to grow 30 percent to 40 percent annually and continue to add to its 50-employee headcount.
Fish will be CEO of Haystax while Pete Shah, the former chief revenue officer, will become COO.
Haystax was launched in 2013 when private equity firm Edgewater Funds acquired two Northern Virginia companies, Digital Sandbox Inc. and FlexPoint Technology LLC, and set out creating a cyber platform for defense, intelligence agency and commercial clients. Edgewater had linked up the year before with Bill Van Vleet, a cyber exec with ties both here and in California, to build a next-generation intelligence company. Van Vleet was previously CEO of Applied Signal Technology Inc., which he sold to Raytheon for approximately $500 million.
Fish said Edgewater will stay on as a minority owner.
Last month, two local cyber startups unveiled Series B venture funding rounds of $20 million or more on successive days, underscoring the market opportunity at a time of increasingly complex threats by well-organized nefarious actors, often state-backed. Upstarts maintain the established players can’t address cyber threats well or don’t measure up to what customers want — but it’s also, critics say, ushered in a lot of the noise in the market courtesy of companies that are long on marketing but short on technology that does what it says it does.
CYDERES Announces Availability of EMDR Service
KANSAS CITY, Mo., April 6, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — CYDERES, the security-as-a-service division of Fishtech Group, today announced the availability of CYDERES EMDR, its Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service that helps organizations with detection, investigation, remediation, and proactive hunting of threats.
As security breaches continue to escalate in pace and scope, CYDERES EMDR is a human-led, machine-driven managed detection and response service that integrates security tools with exceptional experts to drive automated outcomes via a proprietary platform. CYDERES supplies the people, process, and technology to help organizations manage cybersecurity risks, detect threats, and respond to security incidents in real-time.
“CYDERES answers a problem that wasn’t being solved – how organizations can defend their data and stay focused on their core business,” said Fishtech CEO and Founder Gary Fish. “Our proprietary platform is revolutionary in the way it gathers disparate data together for effective, real-time threat detection.”
The CYDERES EMDR offering combines threat detection, investigation, remediation, and proactive threat hunting through:
- Technology independence
We believe organizations must be free to select the right security solutions for their needs. The CYDERES platform drives automated outcomes and real-time interdiction leveraging those technologies, without requiring a specific set of security tools or locking you in to a proprietary SIEM. - Coverage across modern hybrid, private and public cloud, plus on-premise environments
Our team includes experienced SecDevOps experts and Certified Cloud Security Professionals who can help secure on-premise environments as well as a migration to the cloud. - Action-oriented
We don’t route alerts. A lot of MSSPs create more work for their customers. We’re here to serve as a true force multiplier to your team and drive real-time interdiction of threats.
“Organizations are under constant attack and prevention alone is failing,” said Fishtech CISO Eric Foster, who leads the CYDERES team. “Cybersecurity today requires actively detecting threats and responding in real time. While that’s not feasible for most organizations, we are committed to offering legendary service at a fair price to enable organizations to meaningfully improve their detection and response capabilities.”
In March, Fishtech broke ground on its 20,000 square foot Cyber Defense Center, which will house the CYDERES team. Fish and Foster will demo the CYDERES platform during the upcoming 2018 RSA Conference.
About Fishtech Group
Fishtech delivers operational efficiencies and improved security posture for its clients through cloud-focused, data-driven solutions.