All About Peerlyst, a Thriving Online Platform for Cybersecurity Professionals

I am very proud to contribute to both Tripwire’s the State of Security and to be a regular Peerlyst poster. Peerlyst is a very important online platform for cybersecurity professionals.

It’s my pleasure to speak with Limor Elbaz, Peerlyst’s CEO and founder. She shared with me some excellent insight about what inspired her to start Peerlyst and what makes the platform stand out from the crowd.

Kim Crawley: What inspired you to establish Peerlyst?

Limor Elbaz: My entire career was in security, from the Israeli army through starting Sansa Security, which delivered a crypto engine that is now embedded on every iPhone and Samsung phone, through starting the virus lab at Finjan and creating new products in alliances with companies like McAfee and Trend Micro. In my last gig, I was VP of corp dev at Imperva/Incapsula.

In all these roles, I’ve watched the challenge of security professionals learning, sharing knowledge, consulting with peers and the inherent conflict between security professionals and vendors. Security products are vital for the work of protecting an organization, yet most of the threat education comes from companies making those products or companies paid by them. I wanted to create a place where security professionals (and later, more IT people) will be able to share knowledge, educate and get educated, do a better job, and of course advance their career.

Along the way, we learnt that we can help vendors too by giving them a focused stage for education while keeping the quality high and not harming the users’ experience. We’re also learning that we can help recruiters fill security jobs without spending hours on interviewing irrelevant candidates.

KC: What’s the story of Peerlyst?

LE: We started by building a comprehensive algorithm to detect product names and the security taxonomy (Read more...)