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Going beyond the basics to keep organizations truly cyber secure

Ron Schlecht is the founder and managing partner of BTB Security, an information security company headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, PA, with offices in Chicago, IL, and Austin, TX. Through a comprehensive approach that goes beyond the basics—the meaning behind the company’s namesake acronym—BTB Security helps clients detect emerging cyber threats, protect sensitive data, and defeat cyber criminals. The firm serves a wide range of industries—including financial services, education, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and more—as well as government clients. BTB Security is listed on the Inc. 5000, where it has been named one of the nation’s top security companies (#23).

EDWIN WARFIELD: I imagine that recruitment is extremely important for your company. How do you go about finding and hiring people with hacking experience and who understand the latest complex cybersecurity issues? What’s the corporate culture like?

RON SCHLECHT: One of the greatest responsibilities that we've had in building the company is putting a team together that are not only experts in their field but cohesive in terms of how they work together. I can't say that there was any grand plan in terms of HR planning or anything like that—that there's special sauce or a special plan involved—but the folks that we have in place to support what we're doing—our business mission, and our different offices—have been absolutely phenomenal. I would like to think that one of our biggest challenges going forward is trying to maintain the culture that we have within our company, and at the same time scaling with the size. We have a great time doing what we do—we work really hard—but at the same time, there aren’t many times I can remember when people didn't have a smile on their face and weren't excited to actually be there and trying to further the goals of the company along. We like hiring people that we like, and when we have that mix and that expertise, it makes it a really fun work environment.

Q. What cybersecurity threats and trends should people be paying attention to now? What technologies and considerations are at the top of your mind?

A. Folks in the industry have talked about the security implications of the internet of things ad nauseum. We know that the potential for people to connect them to places where they shouldn't be connected opens up a host of opportunities for the bad guys. If you hook anything to a secure network, or what you think is a secure network, it may have vulnerabilities that aren't vetted or aren't known. There's a potential to use that particular device, whatever it may be, to piggyback into an environment that should be or is relatively secure.

That's the security aspect of it. I think what we've spoken less about in the past couple of years is the privacy aspect of it. We have all of these devices—people enjoy them—and in most cases we're willfully giving up tons of privacy information about ourselves because of how we use these things. It's all in the name of convenience, and it's all in the name of hopefully making these products work for you better, but the type of information that they're storing—that they're transmitting—that, quite honestly, everybody seems to be okay with, is where I think the bigger problem lies.

I don't think it's going to change. I think it's actually just more interesting that as a younger generation comes up, they're actually okay with more of their private information being out there and being used to market to them. The unfortunate thing is that that information that’s being used to market to you? It's also susceptible to being stolen. And they're going to know information about you.

I think one of the more surprising things—and it isn't really an internet of things concern—but lately everybody’s been jumping on the bandwagon of doing this DNA testing, and it seems relatively mundane: you're going to do this DNA testing and you're going to figure out where your ancestors were from, and what they don't understand is that's giving up that privacy. You're sending out information, your DNA is analyzed, and it's telling you where you're essentially from or what your makeup is. All of the backend infrastructure for one of those services sits in China. What are the Chinese doing with your DNA information? Who knows. What are the possibilities there? They could build datasets to work on several different things. The point being that with internet of things and a lot of the technology that we're being used to, we're giving up a lot of that privacy, and the information that we're willfully talking about, we're giving details about usage statistics—whatever it may be. I think it's just going to continue because people are more open with that activity than they ever have been.

As far as what we're seeing in the next few years: the industry has continued to grow, and with any good industry that's growing, there's a lot of opportunity there. So, we've seen a lot of people jump into that industry that don't necessarily have the background and experience. But, at the same time, there are some viable products and some viable services out there.

I fully expect in the next couple of years that we're going to see a shrinking in that industry space as well. You're going to see a lot of acquisitions, a lot of mergers—probably a lot of activity in that sense, because we can't continue to fuel nonstop growth. There's probably going to be a lot of consolidation and a little bit of contraction as we move forward in the next couple of years. But, with that said, there's still a lot of opportunity for growth. It seems like every year there's something new: there's a new technique, there's a new service offering. It's going to be quite interesting over the next few years to watch the companies that spring up, the companies that merge and get together to build larger alliances, and the people who don't quite make it because they haven't been able to innovate.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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