The IT Nerd

Last week, I had a chance to get a briefing from a company called StrikeReady about a product called CARA which stands for Cyber Awareness And Response Analyst. Before I get to what CARA is, let me define the problem so that you can understand why CARA will make such a difference.

Right now it’s insanely difficult to get people to work as part of cybersecurity teams. And even if you get the staff, chances are that they are going to be on the junior side where experience may become the difference between catching a threat before it becomes a problem and not. On top of that, they have a ton of tools to work with and manage. In other words, cybersecurity teams have a lot of balls to keep in the air and that is difficult at times, if not impossible.

This is why CARA can make such a difference. CARA can:

• Allow team member to ask questions in a conversational style like “what is Emotet?”
• CARA will then answer the question within the context of cybersecurity rather than the context of Google and will include the latest information that is relevant to you and your environment. And on top of that, CARA can also check a variety of tools within your environment to see if your question is one that perhaps affects your attack surface. For example if the check of your tools reveals that you are open to being pwned by Emotet, it will let you know.
• The next thing that CARA will do is help you to secure your environment using the tools that you have by offering remedies and mitigations that it can apply with your permission. I should note that CARA comes out of the box with a large number of integrations with popular cybersecurity tools such as Crowdstrike, IBM Qradar, and FireEye. And if you are using something that isn’t in the list of integrations, StrikeReady can help you get that tool supported by CARA within a two week or more timeline depending on the tool in question.
• CARA can also independently monitor for threats and report on that in ways that ensures that you will action the most important info first.

In short, CARA is part of your cybersecurity team. Only CARA is working 24 hours a day to keep you safe.

This will make life much easier for cybersecurity teams. And I the demo that I got on it by Anurag Gurtu, who is the CPO of StrikeReady impressed me. For starters, he showed me how CARA processed conversations by having a debug menu on the screen the entire time. Typically, we in the media don’t get to see how the sausage is made so to speak, so the fact that he was willing to show that to me was pretty cool. Second, seeing him walking through a workflow of a cybersecurity analyst looking for information on Emotet by asking CARA about Emotet, and then having CARA show information on Emotet as well as the attack surface that existed in his demonstration environment was impressive. Then being able to reduce the attack surface with a few clicks via the tools that you already own and CARA is set up to use was equally as impressive. I can see how companies who use CARA are going to be in a much better position to respond to cyber threats than those who don’t.

CARA is a Software As Service offering that is aimed at companies that are a few thousand employees in size or bigger. That’s because companies of that size are often more mature when it comes to cybersecurity because they have tools like Crowdstrike, Radar, and FireEye at their disposal. Smaller companies typically don’t, and I would suggest that this should be a message for smaller businesses to up their cybersecurity game as I believe that they could benefit from CARA.

I’ve scratched the surface as to what CARA can do. I encourage you to look at StrikeReady’s use cases and case studies to really go in depth as to why CARA is a potential game changer for cybersecurity.

This entry was posted on August 15, 2022 at 10:00 am and is filed under Commentary with tags StrikeReady. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.