Interview with Mike Wiacek, CEO and CTO of Stairwell, as part of our interview series
Stairwell, a pioneering cybersecurity company, is making waves in the industry with its unique data-first approach to threat detection and response. Founded by Mike Wiacek, the company's CTO and visionary, Stairwell aims to help organizations stay one step ahead of cyber threats.
At the heart of Stairwell's approach is the continuous collection, storage, and analysis of every executable file, script, and indicator of compromise across all time. This data-driven method allows cybersecurity teams to not only detect active threats but also uncover past attacks that traditional tools might have missed. Unlike conventional security tools like SIEMs or EDRs, Stairwell preserves and reanalyzes raw files, even if those files were deleted, renamed, or dormant, providing full historical context and comprehensive threat detection.
Stairwell's goal is to unify all teams by analysing what's actually running in an environment, not just what's being logged about it. The company's AI models provide instant reverse engineer-level insight into suspicious files, context-rich answers about intent, functionality, and relationships, and variant-aware detection that doesn't break when adversaries repack or rename their malware.
With Stairwell, defenders are given the ability to think like attackers by providing visibility into everything that runs and continuously analysing raw artifacts. The industry, largely built around logs, which are interpretations and observations, according to Mike Wiacek, stands to benefit greatly from this shift.
Stairwell's next-generation security approach uses signal intelligence, including an enterprise's files, to bring a data search approach to security. This allows for the investigation of malware in seconds. The platform also helps security teams operationalize their threat intelligence by identifying devices infected with malware in seconds and making file triage trivial.
Stairwell's AI models are built on a deep foundation of billions of real-world artifacts, global file prevalence, variant lineage, and years of threat behavior. This foundation gives Stairwell a strong advantage in finding never-before-seen malware created by AI, as it uses file analysis and data search techniques to investigate.
The company's success is measured by preventing malware from being transferred to another system, even when other security tools have missed it. Stairwell equips security teams to identify zero-day threats and make informed decisions faster with advanced static and behavioral analysis.
Stairwell was founded by Mike Wiacek after leading security efforts at Google TAG and Chronicle due to a perceived gap in the cybersecurity landscape. The gap, according to Wiacek, was the lack of continuity and shared truth among threat intel teams, SOCs, and IR teams. Stairwell's approach to threat hunting is proactive and retrospective, enabling the detection of both active threats and past attacks that may have gone unnoticed.
In conclusion, Stairwell's innovative data-first approach to cybersecurity offers a promising solution for organizations seeking to stay ahead of the ever-evolving threat landscape. By providing a unified platform for threat detection and response, Stairwell empowers security teams to think like attackers, operate proactively and retrospectively, and make informed decisions faster.
- Stairwell's novel data-first approach to cybersecurity, rooted in technology, aims to bridge the gap in the industry by providing a unified platform for threat detection and response, leveraging finance for business growth.
- With its advanced data-and-cloud-computing capabilities, Stairwell's unique approach to cybersecurity not only helps organizations stay one step ahead of current threats but also uncovers past attacks that traditional tools may have missed, thus enhancing overall business security.
