Risky Biz Soap Box: Cylance talks Persona

As regular listeners know, this isn’t the weekly Risky Biz news and current affairs show, if you want that, scroll back in the podcast feed to the previous podcast. This is a Soap Box edition, a solely sponsored podcast series we do here at Risky Biz where vendors pay us to come on to the show to talk about, well, whatever they want, really. We’ve heard Duo Security talking about WebAuthn, we’ve got one with Proofpoint coming up that’s about insights they’ve gleaned from filtering such ridiculous amounts of email. But in this edition, Garret Grajek from BlackBerry Cylance will be along to talk about its new product, Cylance Persona. This latest product is kinda out of the box, it’s a machine learning classifier that you install on the endpoint that learns what the typical user behaviour looks like. Once the observed user behaviour starts diverging from what’s expected, it can perform actions – like kicking up for 2fa, locking the user out, whatever you want, really. It’s a novel approach to dealing with compromised endpoints. Two factor authentication is great, but if your endpoints are hosed that doesn’t really count for much. And that’s really what this new gear is about.