Click here for Part I, Part III & Part IV

Protecting enterprise and government networks against millions of cyber threats every day

Suzanne Magee is the co-founder and chief evangelist officer of Bandura Systems. Chris Fedde is the company’s CEO. Headquartered in Columbia, MD and Lake St. Louis, MO, Bandura Systems is the creator of the PoliWall® TIG™ (Threat Intelligence Gateway), a comprehensive security platform designed to help enterprise and government networks combat emerging cyber threats. The company’s first TIG was developed for the US Department of Defense. Now, Bandura offers its automated, scalable product to businesses, agencies, and institutions seeking to protect their sensitive data without diverting staff resources.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Tell us about your company. How does Bandura help organizations address cyber threats in ways other solutions can’t?

CHRIS FEDDE: The threat intelligence business has been maturing. There’s a lot of vendors of threat intelligence; it’s become real intelligence, up-to-date intelligence; it’s just an awful lot of power in threat intelligence feeds from the various companies that provide it. What hasn’t been true is that it’s been operationalized. People can’t use it. They certainly can’t use it in an automated mode. And so it’s really been the realm of large companies. Large companies have been using threat intelligence for years, unlocking the power of threat intelligence; however, they’ve got staffs—they’ve got money, they’ve staffs, they can put resources on it and so they’ve been using the threat intelligence primarily for detecting and responding to events.

The technology that Bandura brought to bear here is the ability to use it on commercial hardware and use all of the threat intelligence to block the known threats. By blocking the known threats, you can prevent all that’s known from ever hitting your network. So, it does a number of things simultaneously: it makes the products that you've already invested in work better because you’re not getting clobbered by all these other threats; it unloads the staff workload because they're now not spending so much time detecting and responding to events, which typically 80% of the staff time is spent on that. It benefits networks in the areas that they're almost all universally hurting in right now: staff overload, the investments they've made are getting also overloaded; and so, it really does go right to the heart of some the current number one and number two problems in most businesses.

The other thing that's so notable here, as I mentioned, it rides on commercial hardware. That means we can make it affordable to the small and medium businesses, who have always been locked out of making use of threat intelligence. We can go to a small business and medium business, size the product for their network, for their budgets, and unlock threat intelligence for them too. That's where there’s been tremendous success, before I got there, under Suzanne's leadership, and that's where we're focusing right now with some of the new folks we brought on: is to go after those small and medium businesses that have been unable to make use of threat intelligence to date.

Q. Can you take us through the early days of developing the platform for the Department of Defense? What made you decide to spin it into a private sector solution?

SUZANNE MAGEE: Back in the TechGuard Days—this is actually how we ended up in Maryland with our mission to help secure the critical infrastructure of the United States—a bold mission from a basement in Missouri—we realized very quickly that we needed to have a presence near the government because that was a mission focus for us. We were able to locate in the UMBC Tech Center. With TechGuard, we opened our first expansion office there. So it was very natural when we spun out Bandura from TechGuard, once again we were here because of the proximity to all of the network security going on with the government. But also there was the Cyber Incubator Program at UMBC under Ellen Hemmerly, and so very natural for us to spin out Bandura as a Maryland company.

But our Department of Defense work, because of our mission focus, took us really, as pioneers, using artificial intelligence even back in the year 2000 to address some of the “how do you get ahead of the hackers?” How do we become proactive versus reactive? Of course, this was extremely interesting to the Department of Defense. We worked very closely with organizations in the National Security Council and the White House—OMB, NIST—in the formation of policy around cyber security; very closely aligned mission-wise. That’s how we started, and then we had some congressional interest and support when we did testimony on Capitol Hill that “maybe there are some introductions into some of these military programs that could really use your approach in what you’re doing,” and so that’s really how we did it. We collaborated with the Army initially and we were able to develop some very effective tools and techniques that now we have spun out to the commercial sector, especially to help these small to mid-sized businesses.

Connect with Chris and Suzanne on LinkedIn

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