KnowBe4 has announced that it has officially closed on the acquisition of SecurityAdvisor in a move that will enable a new advancement in the fight against social engineering attacks, the primary method for ransomware infection.
SecurityAdvisor has built more than 50 integrations to leading cybersecurity products including Crowdstrike, Zscaler, Okta, Netskope and many others, which analyze real-time user behavior that poses a potential security risk and pushes micro-learning modules to educate and inform the user in direct response to their risky behavior. Combining KnowBe4’s leading platform for security awareness training and simulated phishing testing with real-time behavior analysis and micro-learning results in the creation of a new cybersecurity category called “Human Detection and Response (HDR)”.
“HDR represents a significant leap forward in enabling your users to defend against the ongoing problem of social engineering attacks,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO, KnowBe4. “We will now be able to correlate the training and testing of users with their real-world behavior to provide the Security Operations Center (SOC) with a much richer picture of your company’s human firewall. This user behavior data can also be fed back to the SOC, highlighting areas for closing gaps within their current technology stack and improving the efficacy of the products that they already have in place. HDR will provide the SOC an entirely new capability that sits within the Human Defense Layer of their cyber architecture.”
The Human Defense Layer represents a set of technologies, processes and policies that is focused on both defending users against attacks, as well as equipping and educating users to defend themselves and their company against the many types of social engineering attacks including phishing, business email compromise, credential theft, breached passwords and even deep fakes.
“For too long, the human layer of cybersecurity has been neglected, leaving users vulnerable and establishing a soft target for cybercriminals that they continue to leverage, leading to the plague of ransomware that we are seeing today,” continued Sjouwerman. “It is time for our industry to step up and acknowledge that the Human Defense Layer must become a core pillar of the cybersecurity architecture that sits alongside endpoint, network, cloud and identity.”
With the closing of the SecurityAdvisor acquisition, the first since KnowBe4 went public on the NASDAQ in April 2021, KnowBe4 looks to revolutionize the way Security Operations Centers monitor end user behavior. The next several months will be spent integrating the product into the core KnowBe4 platform, building in automation capabilities and extending the ecosystem.