Five years ago all the chatter was about private financing being the “new” normal for tech, as it offered closer control with fewer disclosure requirements. Companies like Uber were raising insane amounts of private money while thumbing their nose at public markets.
Now all of a sudden it seems there’s a new IPO filing every week or so. Does this indicate a stronger economy and/or pressure from shareholders to allow their investments to become more liquid, or are people smelling a downturn around the corner and hoping to cash out before valuations drop?
Personally I think it's both. We're seeing companies that normally would have gone public (enterprise software like Carbon Black) at the appropriate time, combined with some companies where it makes little sense to go public (Spotify, Snapchat) that I think are cashing in before the bottom drops out.
Carbon Black has nowhere to go but up, they're destroying the AV industry and every security consultant I know is pushing this style of endpoint protection over traditional AV. And they're in the enterprise market, so they can charge big bucks.
Spotify on the other hand is one player in a crowded and competitive market with some huge players who could destroy them in a heartbeat. And even with their exclusives and much bigger subscriber count, they're still struggling to beat much smaller competitors in actual engagement [1] (or at the very least struggling to properly count their streams which seems like a basic requirement). It makes little sense for them to go public when they could just as easily be out of business this time next year.
As a carbon black victim who gets angry at CB consuming %50 of my CPU in the kernel as I do builds that touch many small files, it just feels like a combination of corporate spyware/rootkits, traditional antivirus and uploading that info to a backend. Am I wrong?
Why hasn't traditional AV created a similar product then?
Carbon Black is far from the only player in the space. Tanium, Crowdstrike, Trusteer, Cylance, Cisco AMP, etc.
The way these "next-gen" endpoint systems work is by doing a deep analysis of every file, and like you said, uploading the hash to a central server for faster processing later. Your use case is atypical for CB customers but I fully believe you're having these issues. There's a drawback to every kind of endpoint protection. It does seem that the more general population is worse off with traditional malware protection than CB, but your use case seems non-traditional.
I should note that I am not affiliated with any endpoint product and AFAIK the absolutely massive company I work for doesn't even have an endpoint product that competes in the next-gen space. I'm just a security consultant who sees a lot of Fortune 500 companies and notices the trends they set/follow. It's trending away from Symantec and towards Carbon Black/Tanium/Cylance/etc.
Do you feel it’s technically superior or just people following the fancy new tech dragon (or something else like because it also lets you spy on employees, if it does, I don’t know)?
(Not that it’s really fancy new tech - checksum AV have been around even since DOS. I’d have thought the best thing would be a combination of the two).
I do think it's technically superior when used right. Namely, application whitelisting is technically superior. Most employees only have a small number of applications they need to run, and making sure everything else fails to start is the right choice.
Obviously it's not perfect for everyone and technical staff will often need to run esoteric and constantly-changing applications, so whitelisting isn't always possible. In that case, using a checksum and having the central server is a better way of handling it. Better yet is something like FireEye which can intercept your file downloads and scan them before it hits your machine. I can't speak for which next-gen endpoint solution works best since that's not my area of expertise, but I can say it's better than traditional AV (which is basically useless). In that case, blacklisting is the better choice, for software no one should have installed.
"Spying on employees" is an interesting take on what I consider to be basic security. I'm heavily involved in technology that, if the end user saw what we could see, they'd be horrified. Basically, if you're in the US and using your employer's laptop on your employer's network, you have zero privacy and everything you do and every site you visit is being logged into a central log repository and can be made available to the security and audit teams at a moment's notice. Most of the time no one is watching it, no one except an AI looking for anomalies and reporting on outliers, but it's possible. If you're doing DNS lookups to your company's DNS server, they know every site you've visited. If you're using telnet or ftp or POP3, they know your passwords too, because they're likely sniffing internal network traffic as well and storing packet captures. And they may even be breaking SSL at the proxy or gateway level, so that doesn't help you.
Basically, if you're worried that Carbon Black sending a list of your installed applications is your employer "spying" on you, they're already collecting far more data than you think. Installed applications is the least of your concern. But again... that's not your laptop and it's not your network. It's all owned by your company, and governed by their acceptable use policy in the employee handbook.
Freehunter, grateful for your thoughts on the below in response to your comment about technical staff running esoteric and constantly changing apps and therefore whitelisting isn't always possible.
Can apply prevention for
PowerShell, bat, java, javascript(node.js), perl, python, php scripts
Any other specified interpreter can be added using an Enhanced Scripts feature
REGSVR32.EXE (2016) without disabling its use
“Trusted Script” technology allows IT to continue using REGSVR32.EXE while blocking any untrusted scripts loaded
Dynamically generated scripts (Trusted Children) e.g. Apps that spit out constantly changing .BAT scripts
HP Warranty Checker
Dell’s KACE
Continuum RMM
And any application can be trusted by one click and that trust propagated across the enterprise similar to Active Directory’s inheritance mode.
Sorry, I honestly have no idea. I don't work with endpoint that closely, I'm more on the security architecture side. I have wonderful technical engineers on my projects who are paid to get that in-depth, but that's not me.
I call it the office bathroom camera problem & the creepy sysadmin problem. If employers were forced to be upfront about what they were doing, the equivalent of putting cameras inside each bathroom stall and having no real access control over what admins are doing with that data, people would be creeped out very quick.
They might move to employers who aren't that creepy.
I think it's a sexual harassment scandal waiting to happen, and hope things like the laws in Austria is what the rest of the world will adopt eventually:
You should read your employee handbook. It's not a ToS and it's not a legalese, they're generally pretty straightforward. Don't use your work machine for anything non work related. Pretend your screen can be seen by everyone at the company (because it probably can).
I will note that most regulations in the US (PCI, SOX, etc) require centralized log management. Unless you're at the smallest of small companies, your employer is doing this. It's a basic requirement.
Not all next-gen endpoint solutions do this. An endpoint application execution control can be much simpler.
1. Choose an existing trust list (over 1000 apps/dlls etc trusted) or build your own in a few minutes.
2. Install file filter driver - as soon as driver is installed on endpoint, instant protection, no scanning of drives, folders etc needed.
3. User runs a trusted app - intercepted at kernel, fingerprinted and matched allowed to run. Imperceptible to user.
4. Malware tries to execute - intercepted at kernel, check to see if on trust list, not on trust list - blocked.
5. Need to add a new trusted application? One click, no rules to amend, no whitelists to push to endpoints. All endpoints inherit new app trust and app can execute across global enterprise.
I feel your pain. I used to work for Bit9. Some customers found their Java builds slowed down a lot due to all the temporary files created and Bit9 trying to hash them.
From what I understand, AV just tries to match hash signatures. CB is doing more analysis. It's a tougher not to crack.
In 2016, TPG, Dragoneer and Goldman Sachs lent Spotify $1 billion via convertible debt financing, which was supposed to give the lenders the ability to eventually turn their loans into equity.
The deal let Spotify bide its time before an IPO, but not too much time: The longer Spotify took to go public, the better the terms would get for the lenders. News emerged Wednesday that the company had confidentially filed IPO documents in late December.
Surely now is preferable to during the downturn when you'll get half the value for the same percentage of your company? (Assuming of course that you and I are correct that a downturn is looming).
You’ll get half the value and it remains stable - versus you get twice the value and then it suddenly nosedives and everyone questions your performance as CEO because “you must have made it happen”.
Comments
Five years ago all the chatter was about private financing being the “new” normal for tech, as it offered closer control with fewer disclosure requirements. Companies like Uber were raising insane amounts of private money while thumbing their nose at public markets.
Now all of a sudden it seems there’s a new IPO filing every week or so. Does this indicate a stronger economy and/or pressure from shareholders to allow their investments to become more liquid, or are people smelling a downturn around the corner and hoping to cash out before valuations drop?
Personally I think it's both. We're seeing companies that normally would have gone public (enterprise software like Carbon Black) at the appropriate time, combined with some companies where it makes little sense to go public (Spotify, Snapchat) that I think are cashing in before the bottom drops out.
Carbon Black has nowhere to go but up, they're destroying the AV industry and every security consultant I know is pushing this style of endpoint protection over traditional AV. And they're in the enterprise market, so they can charge big bucks.
Spotify on the other hand is one player in a crowded and competitive market with some huge players who could destroy them in a heartbeat. And even with their exclusives and much bigger subscriber count, they're still struggling to beat much smaller competitors in actual engagement [1] (or at the very least struggling to properly count their streams which seems like a basic requirement). It makes little sense for them to go public when they could just as easily be out of business this time next year.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/17192342/apple-music-the-w...
As a carbon black victim who gets angry at CB consuming %50 of my CPU in the kernel as I do builds that touch many small files, it just feels like a combination of corporate spyware/rootkits, traditional antivirus and uploading that info to a backend. Am I wrong?
Why hasn't traditional AV created a similar product then?
Carbon Black is far from the only player in the space. Tanium, Crowdstrike, Trusteer, Cylance, Cisco AMP, etc.
The way these "next-gen" endpoint systems work is by doing a deep analysis of every file, and like you said, uploading the hash to a central server for faster processing later. Your use case is atypical for CB customers but I fully believe you're having these issues. There's a drawback to every kind of endpoint protection. It does seem that the more general population is worse off with traditional malware protection than CB, but your use case seems non-traditional.
I should note that I am not affiliated with any endpoint product and AFAIK the absolutely massive company I work for doesn't even have an endpoint product that competes in the next-gen space. I'm just a security consultant who sees a lot of Fortune 500 companies and notices the trends they set/follow. It's trending away from Symantec and towards Carbon Black/Tanium/Cylance/etc.
Do you feel it’s technically superior or just people following the fancy new tech dragon (or something else like because it also lets you spy on employees, if it does, I don’t know)?
(Not that it’s really fancy new tech - checksum AV have been around even since DOS. I’d have thought the best thing would be a combination of the two).
I do think it's technically superior when used right. Namely, application whitelisting is technically superior. Most employees only have a small number of applications they need to run, and making sure everything else fails to start is the right choice.
Obviously it's not perfect for everyone and technical staff will often need to run esoteric and constantly-changing applications, so whitelisting isn't always possible. In that case, using a checksum and having the central server is a better way of handling it. Better yet is something like FireEye which can intercept your file downloads and scan them before it hits your machine. I can't speak for which next-gen endpoint solution works best since that's not my area of expertise, but I can say it's better than traditional AV (which is basically useless). In that case, blacklisting is the better choice, for software no one should have installed.
"Spying on employees" is an interesting take on what I consider to be basic security. I'm heavily involved in technology that, if the end user saw what we could see, they'd be horrified. Basically, if you're in the US and using your employer's laptop on your employer's network, you have zero privacy and everything you do and every site you visit is being logged into a central log repository and can be made available to the security and audit teams at a moment's notice. Most of the time no one is watching it, no one except an AI looking for anomalies and reporting on outliers, but it's possible. If you're doing DNS lookups to your company's DNS server, they know every site you've visited. If you're using telnet or ftp or POP3, they know your passwords too, because they're likely sniffing internal network traffic as well and storing packet captures. And they may even be breaking SSL at the proxy or gateway level, so that doesn't help you.
Basically, if you're worried that Carbon Black sending a list of your installed applications is your employer "spying" on you, they're already collecting far more data than you think. Installed applications is the least of your concern. But again... that's not your laptop and it's not your network. It's all owned by your company, and governed by their acceptable use policy in the employee handbook.
Freehunter, grateful for your thoughts on the below in response to your comment about technical staff running esoteric and constantly changing apps and therefore whitelisting isn't always possible.
Can apply prevention for
PowerShell, bat, java, javascript(node.js), perl, python, php scripts
Default “Trusted Scripts” applies to msi, msu, bat, cmd, ps1, psc1, psm1, vbs, wsf, vbe, ocx, cab, py, pyo, pyw, pl, pm, pls, rb, rbw, js, php files
Any other specified interpreter can be added using an Enhanced Scripts feature
REGSVR32.EXE (2016) without disabling its use “Trusted Script” technology allows IT to continue using REGSVR32.EXE while blocking any untrusted scripts loaded
Dynamically generated scripts (Trusted Children) e.g. Apps that spit out constantly changing .BAT scripts HP Warranty Checker Dell’s KACE Continuum RMM
And any application can be trusted by one click and that trust propagated across the enterprise similar to Active Directory’s inheritance mode.
Sorry, I honestly have no idea. I don't work with endpoint that closely, I'm more on the security architecture side. I have wonderful technical engineers on my projects who are paid to get that in-depth, but that's not me.
I call it the office bathroom camera problem & the creepy sysadmin problem. If employers were forced to be upfront about what they were doing, the equivalent of putting cameras inside each bathroom stall and having no real access control over what admins are doing with that data, people would be creeped out very quick.
They might move to employers who aren't that creepy.
I think it's a sexual harassment scandal waiting to happen, and hope things like the laws in Austria is what the rest of the world will adopt eventually:
https://www.taylorwessing.com/globaldatahub/article_austria_...
You should read your employee handbook. It's not a ToS and it's not a legalese, they're generally pretty straightforward. Don't use your work machine for anything non work related. Pretend your screen can be seen by everyone at the company (because it probably can).
I will note that most regulations in the US (PCI, SOX, etc) require centralized log management. Unless you're at the smallest of small companies, your employer is doing this. It's a basic requirement.
Not all next-gen endpoint solutions do this. An endpoint application execution control can be much simpler.
1. Choose an existing trust list (over 1000 apps/dlls etc trusted) or build your own in a few minutes.
2. Install file filter driver - as soon as driver is installed on endpoint, instant protection, no scanning of drives, folders etc needed.
3. User runs a trusted app - intercepted at kernel, fingerprinted and matched allowed to run. Imperceptible to user.
4. Malware tries to execute - intercepted at kernel, check to see if on trust list, not on trust list - blocked.
5. Need to add a new trusted application? One click, no rules to amend, no whitelists to push to endpoints. All endpoints inherit new app trust and app can execute across global enterprise.
I feel your pain. I used to work for Bit9. Some customers found their Java builds slowed down a lot due to all the temporary files created and Bit9 trying to hash them.
From what I understand, AV just tries to match hash signatures. CB is doing more analysis. It's a tougher not to crack.
Spotify was "forced" into IPO in a way: https://www.recode.net/2018/1/3/16847786/spotify-tpg-tencent...
It's a confluence of all of those factors:
- Dropbox demonstrated a reasonably strong market for IPOs, so it's definitely safer for other companies to get in before the first flop.
- There's probably a lot of pressure to go public, seeing as how many of these companies have private for more than a decade [1]
- There's also reason to believe we may see pressure in the equity markets in the near future, especially as the Fed adjusts interest rates.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bit9/funding_rounds/... Series A was in 2005
It seems like a terrible time to put your org's shares into the public market, so late in the business cycle with the eventual downturn looming.
EDIT: Agree that if you must go public, go before the music stops. I'm wrong here.
Now's the perfect time. We're near the peak, so valuations are very inflated.
Surely now is preferable to during the downturn when you'll get half the value for the same percentage of your company? (Assuming of course that you and I are correct that a downturn is looming).
You’ll get half the value and it remains stable - versus you get twice the value and then it suddenly nosedives and everyone questions your performance as CEO because “you must have made it happen”.
Is that possible?