Tenable, Inc., the Cyber Exposure company, announced the expansion of Tenable Research, an expert team of cybersecurity researchers and data scientists focused on transforming vulnerability data into strategic insights which help organisations manage, measure and ultimately reduce cyber risk. The existing vulnerability research team is joined by a newly created data science team which will work together, alongside the security community at large, to reduce the Cyber Exposure gap, which is defined as an organisation’s inability to understand and accurately represent its Cyber Exposure at any given time.
Tenable Research will leverage its deep vulnerability expertise to identify new vulnerabilities, publish vulnerability checks within Nessus and Tenable.io to help customers rapidly detect issues, leverage these insights to drive more effective processes and technology usage, and fuel new product innovation and capabilities including benchmarking.
“Our objective for Tenable Research is nothing short of eliminating the attacker’s advantage in this new era of digital-everything,” said Dave Cole, chief product officer, Tenable. “Data is becoming the single greatest resource for competitive advantage – and cybersecurity is the single greatest threat.”
“It’s natural for us to bring our deep vulnerability expertise together with human intelligence to help data-driven organisations leverage insights in new and innovative ways to reduce cyber risk. Since the inception of Nessus we’ve worked alongside our 24,000 customers and the security community at large to flip the advantage back to security. This is the next step in our Cyber Exposure journey.”
The global team includes an original research and data science unit led by Tony Bettini, an internationally renowned security researcher and founder and former CEO of FlawCheck, the in container security (acquired by Tenable in 2016).The original research team has been working hand-in-hand with the security community for nearly two decades to build deep vulnerability knowledge into Nessus, the most widely deployed vulnerability assessment solution.
The intelligence and publications unit — which is responsible for all external content from Tenable Research –will be led by Tom Parsons, who brings more than 18 years of expertise in cybersecurity, data science, product management, operational security and globalisation to the role. Collectively, the Tenable Research team bridges experiences as varied as cybersecurity, insurance, academia, robotics, search engines and even professional poker playing, bringing unique perspectives to assessing risk using data while under pressure and in dynamic environments.
According to Tenable Research, the average Tenable customer detects between 8,000 to 9,000 high or critical severity vulnerabilities every month. With a record number of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) identified in 2017 and an exploding attack surface which spans IT, Cloud, IoT and OT, this research exposes an urgent problem and vulnerability prioritisation challenge for security teams.
Furthermore, CISOs are constantly being asked to measure and benchmark the organisation’s cyber risk compared to best-in-class security and industry peers, yet lack an effective way to measure and communicate this data to the Board. The combination of these product and research insights led to new product innovations such as Tenable.io Lumin, the industry’s Cyber Exposure offering that empowers CISOs to confidently visualise, analyse and measure cyber risk.
Further drawing on the strengths of the Tenable Research team, Tenable.io Lumin also uniquely applies data science to the industry’s richest set of vulnerability intelligence so CISOs can quantify their organisation’s cyber risk, assess it against the industry and make better strategic decisions at the Board level.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @IoTNow_OR @jcIoTnow