A Chat with Rahul Powar, CEO at Cybersecurity Software Company: Red Sift

Red Sift’s mission is to democratize the technology essential for cybersecurity. This means making products that are user-centric and address real threat vectors within the cyber and email security space. Our core technology enabler is the Red Sift Open Cloud, a data analysis platform purpose-built for the challenges of cybersecurity. Using this platform and the data extraction and analysis it enables, we’ve created two key products: OnDMARC and OnINBOX.

These SaaS applications work together to close the net on the phishing problem by blocking outbound phishing attacks, analyzing the security of inbound communications, and providing domain impersonation defense.
 
 
Red Sift (@redsift) | Twitter
 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
We spent over 20 years working with large amounts of noisy data and building real-time systems that extract value from them. We recognised that while data is vital for any company to make informed decisions, many companies still struggle to realize this value at the point of decision. We built the serverless Red Sift platform to support the creation of products that needed to do exactly this.

We decided to focus on cybersecurity, in particular email security, as it’s here that this problem is most acute. 90% of cyberattacks start with a phishing email, and technologies such as DMARC stop the impersonation of exact domains when enforced correctly. This sounds like a no-brainer, but many businesses aren’t even aware of DMARC. Those that are, are often overwhelmed with the complexity of setting it up and the cost of getting it wrong. So using our platform we created OnDMARC, which helps businesses to quickly and easily enforce DMARC in an automated, user-centric way.
 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
COVID has induced a significant rise in the number of cyberattacks on businesses, and with this, we’ve seen a surge in businesses keen to quickly and securely implement DMARC. So, our OnDMARC customer base is rapidly expanding. We’ve also recently launched OnINBOX, which uses social intelligence and machine learning to provide advanced threat protection to Office 365 and Google Workspace users.

OnINBOX tells users whether an email is safe to interact with within seconds using an intuitive traffic light system, slashing potential for inbound phishing attacks.
 

What can we hope to see from Red Sift in the future?

 
With Google’s recent announcement of their support for BIMI (the new standard which allows businesses to show registered logos on DMARC authenticated emails), we’re keen to help businesses maximize on this opportunity for brand awareness, and drive the adoption of DMARC in the wider email ecosystem. Partnered with Entrust, we’ve already guided a number of customers through the BIMI pilot program, and to date have enabled the sending of more than 100 million VMC certified emails.

We’ll continue to assess the landscape and create the necessary products to protect businesses of all sizes against threat vectors in the email and cybersecurity space.