Risky Biz Soap Box: Mike Wiacek on lazy mode threat hunting

This Soap Box edition of the show is with Mike Wiacek, the CEO and Founder of Stairwell.

Stairwell is a platform that creates something similar to an NDR, but for file analysis instead of network traffic. The idea is you get a copy of every unique file in your environment to the Stairwell platform, via a file forwarding agent. You get an inventory that lists where these files exist in your environment, at what times, and from there you can start doing analysis.

If you find a dodgy file you can do all the usual malware analysis type stuff, but you can also do things like immediately find out where else that file is in your organisation, or even where else it was. From there you can identify other files that are similar – variants of those files – and search for those. And you can unpack all this very, very quickly.

This is the type of tool that EDR companies use internally to do threat hunting, but it’s just for you and your org – you can drive it. And as you’ll hear, the idea of a transparent, customisable and programmable security stack is something that’s on-trend at the moment. Mike lays out the case that doing this sort of file analysis in your organisation makes a whole lot of sense.