Why I Joined Kasada: Putting Trust Back Where It Belongs

Kasada recently appointed Brad LaPorte as its Chief Evangelist. In this blog post, he shares his reasons why he joined the company.

In my short time here at Kasada, I have come to love my new family. I know you will too. This is one of those things that you just have to see to believe. Kasada is truly unique in its approach. I would like to share this journey with you.

How Did We Get Here???

For the better half of the past two decades, I have been on the frontlines fighting cyber criminals and advising top CISOs, CIOs, CxOs and other thought leaders on how to be as efficient and effective as possible. This was conducted in various advisory roles at the highest levels of top intelligence agencies, as a senior product leader at both Dell and IBM, at a late stage start up, and as a Gartner analyst.

While I was a senior analyst at Gartner, I gained an even greater appreciation as to how bad the threat landscape actually was. I had over 1,000 conversations with leading corporations discussing the rapidly expanding threat landscape and what to do about it. Hacking as a Service (HaaS), ransomware, espionage, account takeover attacks, and data breaches galore. With the majority of these attacks gaining entry through internet facing assets such as websites, mobile apps and APIs.

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After all this time there was always one common denominator, the adversary was always one step ahead of the defenders. I simply could not believe how many companies around the globe struggle to control their online business environment even with supposed state of the art ‘solutions.’ Many of which were spending high dollar investments on products that did not really solve the core problem. Trust was lost.

The Script Kiddies Grew Up

What I came to find out was that while the world was growing up in a big hurry, with cloud adoption, digital transformation and embracing the digital economy, these criminals had gone through their own digital transformation. The Amazon 1-Click shopping equivalent was now on the dark web or also known as the criminal underground. Criminals can now, with a click of a button, gain access to thousands of automation tools and fully managed services aimed to conduct attacks. All preconfigured to bypass top dollar products, locked and loaded with stolen customer data, and only a few US Dollars or a fraction of a Bitcoin away with a money back guarantee.

Screenshot From The Dark Web:

It no longer requires much skill to commit these devious acts that have wreaked havoc on our global economy. To make things worse, prices have commoditized and the global pandemic has made it a feeding frenzy. Criminals have become so good at it that they now have customer reviews and 24×7 support staff on standby in case there are any issues with your ‘purchase.’

Sophisticated attackers are still running rampant as well and pose a more impactful and persistent blow to their targets. The ability for them to retool on the fly is easier than ever and organized factions have adopted tactics that were previously reserved for only nation state and government funded organisations. These tactics, techniques and procedures are now shared widely and have been commercialized. This has been cascaded down to the less skilled attackers as mentioned in detail above as a consulting and/or managed service.

The Awakening!

After evaluating hundreds of solutions and approaches in this space, I eventually discovered Kasada. It was the only solution I have ever encountered that completely flipped me on my axis in terms of my thinking about this systemic problem when it comes to online traffic integrity. The traditional mold has always been a complex game of cat and mouse. You attack me, I block you….rinse and repeat. Round and round the washing machine it goes. At the end of the day do you really know what portion of your online traffic is synthetic or not? What data is truly human driven? ….and with near 100% certainty?!!

What makes Kasada’s approach so unique is they hone in on the source of the attack, as opposed to the attacker. Kasada removes the disguise that threat actors and advanced persistent bots groups use to achieve their ill-intentioned objectives through free and readily available automated tooling. All the while, taking careful measures to frustrate the adversary by (1) deterring reverse engineering attempts through clever obfuscation techniques and encryption and (2) destroying their ROI by inflicting financial damage by way of an increasingly difficult proof-of-work challenge. With little to no maintenance, Kasada’s customers can realize immediate and long-term efficacy after deploying in minutes.

Kasada Just WORKS. Period.

Shortly after joining Kasada and meeting with customers I was further impressed by how simple everything is. Kasada literally just WORKS. Deploy and Destroy. In one scenario, with minimal effort Kasada only took 30 minutes to set up and the malicious traffic dropped near to 0 instantaneously. I was blown away. After years of dealing with failed product deployments, overly priced professional services, and dealing with support issues that seem to last for months this was a breath of fresh air to experience.