Interview With Hen Lamay – Deceptive Bytes

This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Hen Lamay, the VP R&D of Deceptive Bytes, who kindly agreed to share some insight about the company and cybersecurity threats of modern times.

Private Internet Access: Please describe the story behind Deceptive Bytes: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?

Hen Lamay: Our story begins more than a decade ago, as 3 brothers with various backgrounds who wanted to work together. Avi (CTO and a cyber security expert), Sagi (CEO and experienced sales & project manager), and I (Senior software developer and dev team leader on my record) talked about getting more experience so that one day we’ll open a company together, but we didn’t have an idea back then. A few years ago, we thought about a way to prevent malware by using its own defenses & techniques against it, we did some research and decided to establish Deceptive Bytes and build the solution.

Since we founded the company, we have helped various organizations against different types of cyber-attacks, got recognized by leading research firms like Gartner as a Cool Vendor, CB Insights (one of the most promising startups in cyber security) & more, in addition to that, we recently secured our patent application.

PIA: What services do you offer?

HL: We provide our customers & partners with our Active Endpoint Deception platform that dynamically responds to attacks as they evolve and change their outcome. Our patented technology is built into our solution which creates deceptive information based on the current detected stage of compromise through the entire Endpoint Kill Chain. This covers the evolving nature of advanced threat landscape & sophisticated malware techniques, stopping all threats without relying on signatures, patterns, or the need for constant updates.

For our MSSP partners & large multinational organizations, we offer a multi-tenant platform to control multiple customers or subsidiaries under a single management console with our deception platform.

PIA: What is the mission of Deceptive Bytes?

HL: Our mission is to help SME/SMBs, enterprises & MSSPs reduce operational burden & costs by closing the gap and preventing unknown & sophisticated cyber-attacks that are able to evade other security systems using a very lightweight, easy to deploy, use and manage solution.

PIA: What are the worst cyberthreats out there today?

HL: Ransomware is the worst cyber threat organizations are facing in recent years and will continue to suffer for years to come. Each attack causes more damage and the ransomware gangs’ demands are getting higher & higher. The problem with ransomware attacks is not just encrypting the data anymore, they also steal and expose the information they gathered if their demands are not met, which damages the reputation of the organization and exposes their customers & employees data to the world.

Social engineering is also a great threat to organizations, which also leads to malware attacks and information theft. As threat actors are becoming more sophisticated in the way they convince their victims to perform certain tasks to advance their attack (clicking on malicious links, downloading malicious files & documents, etc..).

Eventually, the main challenge defenders have is recognizing new threats as they become more sophisticated and harder to identify. Our focus as an endpoint security solution provider is to know how threat actors defend themselves, which doesn’t change between different types of attacks, and properly help organizations prevent such attacks.

PIA: How is the pandemic changing the way your company deals with cybersecurity?

HL: We’re a cyber security company, so security is embedded in our bones since the day we founded the company. Of course, the pandemic caused other organizations to better understand the need to change the way they deal with cybersecurity, and this led us to be the ones helping with that change.

PIA: How do you envision the future of your industry?

HL: As cyber security becomes more complex and with the claimed shortage in security professionals, the future will bring with it more automation to improve reaction time to attacks, triage, configurations, compliance, and more. This will reduce the load current security personnel face when dealing with various systems and regulations.

Furthermore, as our solution improves cyber resilience by automating response to attacks, reducing security teams’ workload and the need for triage, we’ll see an increase in the usage of active endpoint deception as part of the endpoint security stack in SMEs as well as large enterprises.