After his amazing Curriculaville session, we wanted to give you a deep dive into our speaker, Tiago Henriques, the Director of Engineering – Security at Coalition. Coalition, the leading cyber insurance provider is a partner of Curricula’s and we work together to keep organizations safe from the ever-growing threat of cyber attacks.
Tiago joined us this year at Curriculaville to spread the word about cyber security for National Cyber Security Awareness Month. We were lucky to discuss breaches from the perspective of being a part of the ‘clean-up’ and forensics crew in cyber insurance and more importantly how your organization can avoid them.
Getting to Know Tiago
Tiago has had a rich career in the InfoSec industry transitioning from a Security Analyst to Info Security Auditor to Pentester. In 2015 he set off on his own to found BinaryEdge, an enterprise infrastructure scanning, and attack surface management company. In 2020, Coalition acquired BinaryEdge where he has led the insurance company’s customer security efforts for the past eighteen months as Director Of Engineering – Security.
If you follow Tiago’s blog or Twitter page, you know that he’s passionate about all things cyber insurance and data security. We ‘insure’ you, he knows his stuff.
Awesome Acquisition
As mentioned, a highlight of Tiago’s career thus far was Coalition’s acquisition of BinaryEdge. This is what one might call an ‘awesome acquisition,’ which brought two individually effective companies together to better benefit their customers. We will be breaking down the two organizations and how this merger has changed the cyber insurance world for the better.
Secret Sauce
BinaryEdge now makes up Coalition’s insurance underwriting with scanning technology that sweeps the public internet to expose an organization’s vulnerabilities, with the goal to reduce cyber risk. Many hackers have used Internet scanning tools to target organizations and find holes in their security approach. Coalition allows the ‘good guys’ to level the playing field and figure out their vulnerabilities before hackers have the chance.
Almost everything in your ecosystem can produce data to feed security metrics - from code, to people, to the infrastructure. We collect all this data and focus our research on making sure our machine learning modules can consume this data and output metrics that can help our clients progress the security maturity level of their organizations.
Looking back, Tiago always knew he wanted to do something with internet scanning but didn’t know how or where to start. Fast forward past the challenges of starting a company in Switzerland — where he’d lived for less than a year, didn’t know many people, and didn’t speak its native languages — and lacking any experience in starting a business, BinaryEdge still took the cyber industry by storm… and in came Coalition.
Coalition = Cyber Insurance
Coalition is a cyber insurance company, which covers cyber-related incidents such as breach response, computer replacement, and cyber extortion. Coalition saw a gap in the industry with cyber attacks happening in organizations all the time, without an accessible option for everyone to prevent and mitigate losses.
Cyber insurance is now a critical tool in the security portfolio of every company. Most have come to understand that becoming 100% percent secure isn’t possible and that a cyber insurance policy can often be the only thing stopping a business from going under.
Coalition is different because they support organizations in efforts to reduce cyber risks in addition to helping them recover in case they do get hit with a cyber threat
Coalition Now Leads Cyber Insurance
It’s been over a year since BinaryEdge was acquired by Coalition and based on Tiago’s blog post stating “I have the best job in the whole world,” one can assume things are going pretty well. As for the two companies offering, BinaryEdge still lives as an independent service but has combined its technology with Coalition’s cyber insurance products, platform, and team to change the way cyber insurance is being done (for the better). Tiago highlights that Coalition customers have “the ability to find, investigate, and monitor their assets, and is included at no cost for every Coalition policyholder.”
The benefits of the union are best explained by Tiago: “Together we have the ability to quickly understand a policyholders’ exposure to current and future threats, find their hidden assets and notify them about important security facts that might affect them.”
Want to Learn More?
Replay Tiago’s session at Curriculaville on “Behind the Scenes of a Breach,” to find out what actually happens to an organization that is hit with a cyber attack. In the webinar, he and Curricula’s Nick Santora (CISA, CISSP) break down what happens after a breach and how to prevent this reality for your organization.
