Mike Wiacek, the creator and CTO of Stairwell, features in an interview series
Stairwell, a pioneering cybersecurity company, is transforming the way organizations approach threat detection and response. As a search engine for executables and related files, Stairwell's platform empowers security teams to delve deeper into their files, offering insights that were previously unattainable.
At the heart of Stairwell's cybersecurity platform is a data-first approach. This methodology is centred on continuously collecting and analysing raw executable files, scripts, DLLs, and other file artifacts running in an environment. By treating these raw files as immutable sources of truth, Stairwell's platform can match similarities to detect variants of malware or attack tools, discover relationships among files, infrastructure, and timing, and provide a single source of truth for all teams to analyse and investigate threats across all time periods.
Unlike traditional security measures that often rely on logs or alerts, Stairwell's approach encourages a proactive, strategic defence. Attackers typically do not wait for alerts and operate by chaining together files, infrastructure, and timing to advance stealthily. By thinking in terms of relationships and patterns rather than isolated alerts, Stairwell's platform enables security teams to anticipate and disrupt attacker tactics more effectively.
This approach offers numerous benefits to security teams, including faster triage of potential threats, smarter and earlier detection of malicious activity, and deeper, evidence-based investigations that help stop breaches before they escalate.
Stairwell's success is defined by its ability to prevent malware from being transferred to other systems, even when other security tools have missed it. The platform's AI models provide instant reverse engineer-level insight into suspicious files, context-rich answers about intent, functionality, and relationships, and variant-aware detection.
The company's engineering solution is efficient in gathering, storing, and analysing every executable file in an enterprise. Stairwell operates at a scale of managing over 8 billion file sightings using Google Cloud Bigtable. This unified and continuously updated data repository allows defenders to think like attackers, encouraging a mindset not limited to reacting to alerts or siloed information.
Mike Wiacek, the CTO and Founder of Stairwell, brings a wealth of experience to the company. Prior to founding Stairwell, he led security efforts at Google TAG and Chronicle. Stairwell aims to give defenders the ability to think like attackers, just as Google revolutionised search.
In summary, Stairwell's data-first methodology helps defenders behave more like attackers by focusing on comprehensive, raw data analysis and relationship mapping rather than siloed alert chasing. This approach enables proactive, strategic defence, offering a significant advantage to enterprise-level organizations that require advanced threat detection and incident response capabilities at scale.
References:
[1] Stairwell. (n.d.). [Company Overview]. Retrieved from https://www.stairwell.ai/
[2] Stairwell. (n.d.). [Product Overview]. Retrieved from https://www.stairwell.ai/products/
[3] Stairwell. (n.d.). [Case Studies]. Retrieved from https://www.stairwell.ai/case-studies/
- The data-first approach at Stairwell, a leading cybersecurity company, prioritizes continuous collection and analysis of raw data related to executables, scripts, DLLs, and other file artifacts, providing a single source of truth for security teams to investigate threats in business environments, with the help of technology like data-and-cloud-computing platforms like Google Cloud Bigtable.
- In contrast to traditional reactive security measures, Stairwell's proactive cybersecurity strategy calls for security teams to think in terms of relationships and patterns, rather than isolated alerts, to anticipate and disrupt attacker tactics and ensure effective financial protection for businesses by preventing the spread of malware.
