11 Cybersecurity Tools In One: Meet Heimdal Security

Website Planet had the chance to sit down and chat with Morten Kjaersgaard, the CEO of Heimdal Security, a cybersecurity company already protecting 2.5 million devices worldwide and able to patch 70 million vulnerabilities, all this while delivering intelligence on IT security.

We will learn about their story and will look at their new upcoming product called The Heimdal® Threat-hunting & Action Center.

What is the story behind Heimdal Security? How did it all start, and how has it evolved so far?

Our story started in 2011, when we won the Defcon CTF championship, one of the oldest and most prestigious ethical hacking competitions in the US, with an innovative idea that revolutionized DNS security. In 2014, that idea turned into a product, Threat Prevention, that quickly gathered recognition in the cybersecurity market, so naturally, we took it further and developed an entire suite of products tailored to our customers’ diverse needs.

And because we wanted to keep it simple for the end users, we pushed on with development to combine our threat prevention, patch and asset management, endpoint rights management, and Next-gen antivirus and e-mail security solutions in a unified, easy-to-use dashboard, becoming the vendor with the biggest stack of tools in the cybersecurity market.

Fast forward to 2023, and we are the vendor with the widest security offering of 10 state-of-art products that operate under a single dashboard, a powerful team of XDRs monitoring our clients’ cyber environment 24/7, and, the reason for today’s interview, number 11, our fresh, revolutionary new product – The Heimdal® Threat-hunting & Action Center, which we will tell you more about in the following.

How does your mission differ from the other cybersecurity companies?

In short, we are reshaping cybersecurity as we speak. Cybersecurity can be challenging enough as it is. Our clients should get the best technologies from one vendor so it works out of the box, leveraging the power of unity and automation.

While working on the same end goal as our colleagues in the industry – to help businesses and consumers fight cybercrime on a daily basis, we are simply more focused on “ease of use,” on improving user experience, providing our customers with the most advanced technology for cutting-edge cybersecurity in a unified and easy to use package.

Our main mission, however, is to educate people worldwide about the significance of cybersecurity and equip cybersecurity teams, businesses, and users with the best tools they need to protect themselves. Therefore, an important pillar of our activity is education. Our educational resources are free of charge and can be used by everyone who wants to learn a thing or two about cybersecurity. All they have to do is check out our website, our internationally-awarded blog, and our dynamic and fast-growing YouTube channel.

What kind of online security products do you offer at the moment?

Our portfolio contains eleven products unified in a single platform, with all the features needed to build a powerful, multi-layered defense against the most complex cyber threats. We’ve successfully helped 11,000+ businesses worldwide protect from: advanced ransomware, insider threats, admin rights abuse, APTs, software exploits, brute force attacks, DNS and DoH vulnerabilities, phishing and social engineering, and many other known or hidden threats.

Historically speaking, the most “popular choices” among our customers have been: our famous DNS product – Threat Prevention, our ransomware product – Ransomware Encryption Protection, our patching solution – Patch and Asset Management, and our PAM solution – Privileged Access Management.

• Threat Prevention, our DNS product, uses AI to predict tomorrow’s threats with 97% accuracy, scans user traffic in real-time, and blocks infected domains, preventing communication with cybercriminal infrastructures. It’s available at both endpoint and network levels and is 100% compatible with any other security product on the market.

• Ransomware Encryption Protection, our ransomware-dedicated product, adds to any antivirus by scanning the disk structure and quickly detecting processes that launch file encryptions. It automatically isolates infections and it can be used to spot attacker origins and file connections. It’s available for endpoints, servers, and also for cloud workloads.

• Patch and Asset Management is a fully automated solution that allows patches and updates to be deployed on-the-fly, from anywhere in the world. With this product, admins can patch Linux, Microsoft, and even 3rd party apps. It also provides both automated vulnerability and full inventory management, so administrators can easily track their software assets.

• Privileged Access Management allows system administrators to automatically escalate and de-escalate user rights and manage permissions, helping businesses achieve compliance and successfully putting a stop to the sneakiest of threats: the insider threat.

• And as we speak, Heimdal is also proudly announcing the release of its revolutionary platform, The Heimdal® Threat-hunting & Action Center, a major threat-hunting overhaul that in one single platform leverages powerful, data-driven insights, and proprietary threat intelligence to monitor, secure, and manage vast amounts of data and endpoints. This all rolls up to a single overview of risk and mind-blowingly also offers customers an assisted path to remediation.

These solutions are complemented with the addition of: Application Control, Email Security, Email Fraud Prevention, and Remote Desktop Control managed from a single unified dashboard. The magic of unification!

And on top of this, we also have a SOC service based on our suite of XDR products to help customers monitor devices across their business environment, achieve maximum compliance and employ rapid responses to attacks.

Who are your typical customers, what problems do they have when they come to you, and what makes them prefer you over your competitors?

While we serve customers of all sizes and industries, typically, we see most interest from medium to large-scale size enterprises, which are the ones facing the highest number of cyber incidents as well as the most complex threats. Even the most skilled security teams rely on innovation from vendors in order to be able to sleep at night. However, these businesses are faced with the challenge of having to manage several tools from different providers, which can become detrimental to their budgets.

These businesses are the ones that need automation and unification the most. Now is the perfect time to consider unifying their cyber security tech stacks, although this is something that lots of companies are naturally moving towards. Luckily, we always listen to our customers’ needs, so we saw this powerful trend coming many years ago. I personally have been a massive advocate for this, which is why we’ve developed a powerful suite of products specifically tailored to their needs and, most importantly, unified in a single, tactical command & management console.

Tell us about your new product, The Heimdal® Threat-hunting & Action Center. How does it work, and what gap in the market is it going to fill?

Our revolutionary new product, The Heimdal® Threat-hunting & Action Center, is opening up an entirely new category in the market with a fresh take on SIEM and SOAR technology offerings. In short, it is SIEM & SOAR and much more. By launching this solution into the market, we aim to provide enterprises around the world with a superior alternative to Microsoft Azure Sentinel, Palo Alto Cortex, Splunk, and more.

The Heimdal® Threat-hunting & Action Center works in tandem with at least two products from our suite to offer security leaders and teams an advanced perspective of their IT landscape. Using unique intelligence and a powerful XTP engine, our product provides granular telemetry, built-in hunting, and remediation capabilities, all in one unified platform. It’s designed to reduce alert fatigue by providing a pre-computed finding of risks, hunting capabilities, and assisting in neutralizing threats faster and smarter.

It’s a natural expansion of our existing product suite that we’re really proud of, developed by our expert team after thorough research and discussions with our existing customers. We are certain that this new tool will take threat-hunting to the next level by mitigating risks faster, with less effort, and will supercharge our customers’ productivity.

The new product is available for the general public just now, so if you want to learn more about it, keep a close eye on our website, www.heimdalsecurity.com, to be updated with the latest announcements and/or sign up for a demo.

Apart from your services, what other practices and tools would you suggest to every website owner to secure his data?

Now, our efforts at detecting and doing away with malware would be for naught without stats, and the best indicator out there is risk. So, it’s natural to assume that most, non-traditional, threat-hunting approaches rely heavily on risk assessment, and, of course, mitigation. We cannot get rid of risk, but there are ways to curb it – tools, best practices, compliance standards, etc.

Of course, tools are cool, and all that, but education is the best long-term solution against cyber threats, as many of them still require human input to be triggered. From fake CEO emails and LinkedIn scams to bogus websites that distribute malware, most cyberattacks rely on some form of social engineering to manipulate their victims into opening that email and clicking on its contents, applying to that fake job, clicking on a malicious website and unknowingly download content that could put at risk an entire business.

So, my advice would be to invest in your cybersecurity education as much as you can. Read the news, do the training, and provide your employees with all the necessary resources needed to learn how to spot the first signs of a phishing email, weird-looking message or website. In that regard, we’ve got great educational content curated by an excellent team of writers, so feel free to check our blog and sign up to Cyber Digest – our newsletter with all things cyber.

What do you see in the future of your industry, and how do you plan to cope?

We’ve already touched upon the fact that unification and consolidation will be key, particularly now that there is an economic instability, security teams will be expected to do more with less. Unfortunately, the cybersecurity threats still remain, so businesses will need to be wiser and have a firm grip on their cybersecurity infrastructure to reduce the risks. This will mean better visibility is required and faster response is needed.

We know that malware evolved more over the last five years than it did in the previous 20 years, that ransomware and data leakage are still the biggest issues companies face, and that attackers seem to be targeting critical infrastructure: transport, energy, the financial sector, and even healthcare more than ever before.

Remote work challenges also seem to be accelerating at a whirling rate, attackers get stronger and bolder, espionage is on the rise and deep fakes become increasingly real and dangerous.

To be completely honest, experience has taught us that change is the only constant in this industry, so we stand committed and we constantly work on staying ahead of the game when it comes to cybersecurity. We’re confident that with the right tools and education, our customers can achieve a solid cyber defense and stay safe in the ever-changing cybercrime landscape.

There’s no doubt that the industry will be sure to keep us on our toes, so it’ll be interesting to see what lies ahead. Heimdal will continue innovating to pioneer the way to a safer future.