CEO Huntress on Cybersecurity Trends, Vendor Claims and Curriculum Plans for 2023

Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan says MSPs need to audit security vendors’ claims that they provide 100% security.

Hanslovan told CRN: “24/7 Security When I heard someone say he was providing a service, I looked at the staff and there were six people and someone was either a robot or had a bachelor’s degree. Either you are.”

He said the most effective way to improve security is through education.

“To this day, I see partners buying great next-gen EDRs and other great products, but they don’t configure it, they don’t manage it, and frankly, they don’t. doesn’t have a team of skilled staff to manage it, so we need to solve the problem at a reasonable cost, whether it’s in-house training or outsourcing standardization,” he said. .

The threat research firm has always been a managed security platform, but all work done so far has been on endpoints, even through acquisitions, he said.

“We started looking back and asking our partners, ‘Where are you struggling to manage?’ . And no one wants to manage mundane monotony everywhere, even if they have talent. They don’t want to monotonously manage the cloud. They don’t want to manage user training,” he said.

To help with this, Huntress paid $22 million to buy Curricula in August. It’s a story-based security awareness training platform that helps employees better defend against hackers. About 15 employees came to the acquisition.

“Now we have a whole team full of shady hackers. [MSPs] And bring that expertise,” he said. “It would probably take him three quarters to get to my standards, but today it’s totally usable. Beyond just security awareness training, we just have high standards to raise it.” .”

Training also comes with security vendor accountability.

CRN sat down with Hanslovan to discuss the impact of security awareness training, how the recession will affect ransomware attacks, security trends for 2023, and why MSPs should audit security vendors in the future.