Mike Wiacek, creator and tech head of Stairwell, featured in interview series
Stairwell, a cutting-edge cybersecurity company, is making waves in the industry with its innovative data-first approach to threat detection and response. Founded and led by Mike Wiacek as the CTO, Stairwell's platform is designed to empower security teams to think like attackers and proactively hunt threats in an holistic manner.
At the heart of Stairwell's approach is the continuous collection, storage, and analysis of raw executable files, scripts, DLLs, and indicators of compromise. This data is maintained and reassessed across all time at scale, enabling detection of similarities, variants, relationships, and answering complex queries retrospectively and proactively.
Stairwell's platform is uniquely equipped to find, analyze, and run to ground files that have been deleted, renamed, repacked, or dormant. It achieves this through the use of a cloud-based vault for data storage and by leveraging YARA rules for malware identification on a global scale.
One of the key features of Stairwell is its Intelligent Analysis and Run-to-Ground capabilities, which make targeted malware almost impossible to operate. By providing visibility into everything that runs, Stairwell enables security teams to think like attackers and hunt threats in a manner similar to their adversaries.
Stairwell's success is measured by preventing malware from being transferred to another system, as reported by customers. The company manages over 8 billion file sightings using Google Cloud Bigtable, demonstrating its ability to scale effectively.
In a landscape where threat intel teams, SOCs, and IR teams often work separately and lack continuity and shared truth, Stairwell is designed to unify all teams. Mike Wiacek built Stairwell with the goal of analyzing what's actually running in an environment, not just what's being logged about it.
Stairwell's approach to threat hunting is proactive and retrospective, allowing it to detect both active threats and uncover past attacks that may have gone unnoticed. This makes it an invaluable tool for organizations tired of flying blind, high-value targets, lean teams, and those drowning in alerts.
By bringing a data search approach to security, Stairwell is well-placed to find never before seen malware created by AI. Its AI models are built on a deep foundation of real-world artifacts, global file prevalence, variant lineage, and years of threat behavior. These models provide instant reverse engineer-level insight into suspicious files, forcing attackers into a lose-lose scenario.
Stairwell equips security teams to identify zero-day threats and make informed decisions faster with advanced static and behavioral analysis. It also helps security teams operationalize their threat intelligence, identifying infected devices in seconds and making file triage trivial.
In summary, Stairwell's data-first approach, combined with its powerful AI models and real-time monitoring capabilities, makes it a game-changer in the cybersecurity landscape. By shifting the mindset from reacting to isolated alerts to understanding the relationships and chains attackers use to compromise systems, Stairwell is enabling security teams to proactively and retrospectively hunt threats, improving detection speed and investigation depth well beyond traditional log-dependent tools.
[1] Stairwell. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.stairwell.io/ [2] Wiacek, M. (n.d.). LinkedIn. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikewiacek/ [3] YARA. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://yara-project.org/ [4] Google Cloud Bigtable. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/ [5] Stairwell. (2021, May 11). Stairwell's Data-First Approach to Threat Hunting. Retrieved from https://www.stairwell.io/blog/stairwells-data-first-approach-to-threat-hunting/
- Stairwell's unique platform, rooted in data-and-cloud-computing and powered by AI, is transforming finance and business sectors by providing a proactive approach to cybersecurity, resulting in enhanced data protection and threat detection.
- Leveraging technology such as YARA rules, Google Cloud Bigtable, and a data-first approach, Stairwell empowers its users to identify never-before-seen malware, including those created by AI, thereby strengthening their cybersecurity capabilities and safeguarding valuable business data.
