Blog and Media

In this conversation, Brian Carbaugh, CEO and co-founder of Andesite, shares his unique journey from the CIA (and beore that the Marines!) to the world of cybersecurity. He discusses the challenges and rewards of being a founder, the importance of setting a positive tone for the team, and the necessity of resilience in a startup environment. Brian emphasizes the value of building a supportive team culture, the multi-hat lifestyle of a startup CEO, and the critical role of sales and marketing in a competitive cybersecurity landscape. He reflects on why he chose cybersecurity and the excitement of being a founder,…

Rick Howard, N2K CyberWire’s Chief Analyst and Senior Fellow, turns over hosting duties of his podcast, CISO Perspectives, to William MacMillan, the Chief Product Officer at Andesite, to discuss the Cybersecurity First Principle of automation: current state and what happens now with AI as it applies to SOC Operations. Listen here

Former CIA Officers Brian Carbaugh (Andesite’s CEO and co-founder), Dawn Meyerriecks, and Michael Morell partner with MasterClass to teach declassified techniques on how to assess risk, strengthen relationships, and get ahead in life and business. Skills so good, they’ve been kept secret, until now. What you’re about to read is not for civilians’ eyes. Until now. MasterClass has attained access to three of the CIA’s top former officers, who have been given authorization to share their real-life experiences and the valuable lessons they learned about leadership, critical thinking, and risk management. There’s a reason the CIA keeps its techniques a…

A massive system outage disrupted systems around the world, grounding flights, disrupting health care, transport and logistics, banking services and critical infrastructure. The issue hit computers running Microsoft Windows operating system and CrowdStrike software. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” the company said in a release. “We’re working around the clock and providing ongoing updates and support. Additionally, CrowdStrike has helped us develop a scalable solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix for CrowdStrike’s faulty update,” Microsoft said in a blog post authored by David Weston, vice president, Enterprise…

On Nextgov/FCW, former U.S. officials and security practitioners are wondering how a defective CrowdStrike patch for Windows systems fell through the cracks and created more cascading security risks. CrowdStrike will likely survive and move forward, but, reputationally, it can’t afford another incident like this, said William MacMillan, a former CISO at the CIA. “The update was supposed to be seamless to users,” said MacMillan, now chief product officer at cybersecurity firm Andesite. “Endpoint detection and response has been game changing, but because of where [Falcon] is positioned on the endpoints, if a patch does go wrong … that can have…

A misconfigured content update released by CrowdStrike late on Thursday inadvertently triggered worldwide outages across Microsoft Windows systems, taking many of the world’s most essential services offline. CrowdStrike was attempting to update content that their Falcon Sensor uses to perform real-time threat detection and endpoint protection by monitoring system activities that identify suspicious behavior to prevent cyber attacks. The content update contains logic designed to fine-tune the detection of malicious activities and is based on the latest threat intelligence CrowdStrike collects on a real-time, continuous basis. Read more

If the last two years have taught our industry anything, it’s time to retire to “cybersecurity is recession-proof” colloquialism. Not only have vendors seen cuts and challenges that they didn’t even face in the 2000 and 2008 downturns – but even internal security teams and budgets have been reduced, and defenders have fewer resources against adversaries. Yet, if you’re at the helm of a startup that is trying to grow in the face of all this, especially knowing that you can help defenders scale their scarce resources, you need to cut through the economic headwinds and achieve your goals. I…

Andesite AI, a McLean, VA-based company dedicated to delivering technology to overburdened cybersecurity teams, emerged from stealth with $15.25m in initial funding. Co-developed by Red Cell Partners and General Catalyst, and led by CEO Brian Carbaugh, Andesite has built an advanced AI security analytics platform to “empower both private- and public-sector cyber analysts to defend against advanced persistent threats (APTs).” By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), the solution analyzes decentralized data sets at scale to help cyber defenders and analysts more quickly surface threats and vulnerabilities, prioritize and allocate resources, and respond and remediate in a way that improves security posture…

Andesite AI, a McLean, VA-based firm, emerged from stealth mode with a substantial $15.25m in initial funding. According to FINSMES, the company is dedicated to enhancing the capabilities of cybersecurity teams overwhelmed by sophisticated threats. The funding round was co-led by Red Cell Partners and General Catalyst, marking a robust start for Andesite AI under the aegis of CEO Brian Carbaugh. The capital infusion underscores the confidence investors have in Andesite’s innovative approach to cybersecurity. Andesite AI has developed an advanced AI security analytics platform that serves both private and public sector cyber analysts. This platform leverages artificial intelligence to analyze…