Forcepoint VP says no automatic fix to rising cyber threats

Security software and product firms are now increasingly focusing on human-centric solutions to tackle complex and sophisticated cyber security threats, an executive of Forcepoint said, “Traditional enterprises are coming up with 40-50 stand-alone cyber security products which are threat-based. These products are a piece-meal solution and are not unmanageable as the type of threats keep changing. It’s hence important to have a human-centric solution,” Antti Reijonen, vice-president of Forcepoint said.

Forcepoint has unveiled what it calls a risk-adaptive protection solution that assesses risk and automatically provides proportional enforcement that can be dialed up or down.

“It is enabled through the power of human-centric behavior analytics that understand interactions with data across users, machines and accounts. We can assess if the employee behaviour is normal or not,” Reijonen explained.


The product, Dynamic Data Protection, combines two cyber security solutions — Data Leak Protection and User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA). Both these products are Forcepoint’s recent acquisition from Websense and RedOwl respectively. The Austin-based firm, which was named Forcepoint in 2016, has also acquired Raytheon's security solution “Insider Threat”, Skyfence's cloud-based access broker security and Stonesoft & Sidewinder's next-generation firewall technologies.

“The challenge with many security tools today is that they are static — they don’t adjust to account for different types of users and transactions — and they are also binary: either allow fully or block completely,” said Garrett Bekker, principal security analyst at 451 Research.