Interview with Nir Perry, Founder and CEO, Cyberwrite

Cyber and data risks are among the top concerns faced by enterprises today. Organizations are under a constant threat of being the victim of a cyber attack as technology progresses at a rapid pace.

In an Interview with Analytics Insight, Nir Perry, CEO of Cyberwrite shares his valuable insights on how the company utilizes machine learning to help organizations understand their cyber risk profile and financial exposure to cyber-attacks.

Below are the highlights of the interview:

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization and the services that your company offers.

Cyberwrite provides a proven AI-based Cyber Risk Profiling technology to corporates world-wide with use cases ranging from cyber insurance underwriting to vendor risk management and know-your-customer (Cyber KYC) applications for the banking industry. In simple terms – we are able to help our customers analyze the risks they are exposed to from 3^rd parties and provide bottom line underwriting or risk benchmark score, at scale for millions of organizations worldwide.

With what mission, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

a. The company was formed in 2016 to enable insurance companies with a technology that automates cyber risk underwriting for cyber insurance policies. Following the success with some of the largest insurance companies in the US and the UK, the company has expanded its offering to additional use cases including an innovation in cyber vendor risk management and cyber-KYC. The main challenge our customers are experiencing is how to profile and benchmark 3^rd party cyber risk levels in a way that is quantitative, predictive and cost-efficient. The main issue with exiting solutions today is that you need an army of security experts to make sense of their reports which can reach over 100 pages and can take hours to analyze. Our solution is doing that for you and saves you a lot of money.

b. By using Cyberwrite, our customers manage the risk of doing business with a growing number of organizations and mitigate it. For example, one of our customers have profiled twelve-thousand companies and was able to prioritize which are the highest risk and how they accumulate. Another customer from Lloyd's of London has used our solution to manage cyber insurance aggregation as well as for automated underwriting using our API's. The fact that the leading companies worldwide are using our models and analytics solutions is a huge success and validation.

Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognition and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

The company was recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in 2018 as part of an independent report and was recognized by organizations such as Citi Bank, Plug&Play, 500 Startups, and the UK Government as a leading innovative startup.  Cyberwrite's client list includes Fortune 500 customers, as well as the smaller organization in need of cyber profiling technology and services that can enable them to be compliant with regulatory demands such as GDPR and stay in line with risk management best practices. Cyberwrite customers have reported positive correlation between Cyberwrite predictions and actual cyber incidents in 2018.

Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions towards the company and the industry.

The company was founded by Nir Perry, Cyberwrite's CEO who previously worked at Accenture and PWC, and consulted to some of the largest organizations globally on cyber risk strategy and digital innovation. Nir holds an MBA from the Milano Politecnico School of Management, a Law degree, and is working in the cyber risk domain since 2001 in different roles and organizations. Together with Nir, the company is led by a team of leading experts – Mr. Rami Parient was the Chief Risk Officer of large corporates, and prior to that, he served as the Chief P&C actuary and data-scientist for 15 years in charge of billions of Dollars in premiums written over the years. He was also a professor of statistics in Israel. The company's VP R&D, Mr. Giora Kosoi worked previously at IBM, and Cisco in leading roles of cyber security R&D, and the Head of Research – Uri Fleyder-Kotler led the Cybercrime Research Lab at RSA (Dell EMC).

Tell us how the company is contributing in the Big Data Analytics/Artificial Intelligence/ Deep Learning/ Machine Learning/NLP/ Computer Vision/Cloud Computing Industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

Cyberwrite has developed a proprietary machine learning algorithm which is capable to benchmark companies in different sectors and geographies. We can predict which companies are at a higher risk of monetary damages as a result of a wide range of possible cyber incidents and estimate how much of a financial loss they will suffer. Our analysis is per damage type (e.g.: downtime, extortion, stolen records, etc.). This unique analytics engine is based on extensive R&D research and development efforts conducted by Cyberwrite in our cyber research lab in Israel regarding the various types of data, causality, and predictions that impact cyber risk with specific focus on SMB's (Small and Midsize Businesses). It requires very few data points from the customer, and the process is quick and frictionless.

A user does not have to be a cyber expert to make sense of all this data – our solutions do that for them.

How are disruptive technologies like Big Data Analytics/ Artificial Intelligence/ Cloud Computing/IoT/Robotics impacting today's innovation?

 The combination of available computing power in the cloud, big data technologies that have already matured, and AI is something that will create a strong impact on a large number of organizations and individuals in the coming years. Some for the better and some for worse as automation is everywhere. At the same time – the same tools and methods that security researchers are leveraging to help us protect our digital assets can also be used by cyber criminals to wreak havoc and put our data at risk.

What makes a company innovative? What are the key partnerships and involvements done to drive the innovation?

An innovative company overcomes technological challenges and barriers as an underlying asset to enable their target customers using functional innovation. If the innovation is not functional in the real world, it is not viable in as a business. At the end of the day – an innovative team makes an innovative company.

Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

Cyberwrite has customers in the US, EU, UK, and LATAM. Building a predictive analytics model that works at scale and serves these customers is a huge milestone. We are building the next generation engine which we will launch during 2019 – it will enable our customers to proactively reduce their risks across their portfolio of customers and vendors based on a proprietary recommendations engine.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

Both cyber insurance and vendor risk management are huge opportunities with Allianz predicting Cyber Insurance premiums will reach $20 billion by 2025, and Gartner is forecasting that "by 2022, cybersecurity ratings will become as important as credit ratings when assessing the risk of existing and new business relationships."