Emre Tınaztepe
We’re in the final days of 2022, and time has certainly flown by…
It’s with a massive amount of pride we can look back over the past 12 months and reflect on the collective achievements we’ve made in the DFIR space throughout 2022.
Our focus has been and will always be on our customers. We exist to serve them, and Binalyze is structured to put them at the center of every consideration or decision we make.
The amazing feedback AIR is receiving is further validation of this customer-centric approach. We should be humbled by the positive impact AIR creates for our customers. Whether that’s saving them time closing down cases, improving operational efficiency with its speed of evidence collection, or how automation is helping to boost effectiveness for analysts/investigators.
We’ve certainly come a long way in such a short amount of time.
When I think back to our beginnings in 2018, which was the year Binalyze was founded, we had a single central goal - to take all the learnings that were gained over 15+ years in the cyber security space, assemble a rockstar team and build out a solution that dealt with the new emerging threats that exist for every enterprise.
This involved defining a new type of product within the market - which has ultimately evolved into the accepted terminology of DFIR.
At its core, DFIR is part digital forensics, which is a subset of forensic science and examines user activity, system data, and other pieces of digital evidence. DFIR helps to determine if an attack is in progress or a breach has occurred, along with aiding in identifying who may be behind this activity.
We then combine this with incident response, which in our case, is the overarching process of preparing for, detecting, containing, and recovering from a breach. These tools simply didn’t exist before, and we’ve been at the cutting edge of development right from the start.
Throughout 2022, we’ve worked really hard, looking at global trends, anticipating needs, evolving our feature set, and listening to our customers. Listening and being able to walk in the shoes of our customers is something I obsess over daily. How can we best serve them, intrinsically understand their pain points, and what can we do to provide them with ever-increasing value?
Part of this value proposition has been around constant innovation and the evolution of our solutions. To achieve this, we’ve had to grow our team, and it’s fair to say that in 2022 the Binalyze family has grown significantly. We looked at how we augment our capabilities, maintain an amazing work culture and support our love for remote working.
Sometimes rapid growth comes with inherent risk, but we found the right people to foster our “think we before me” mentality. People that supported the ideals of being one team, who continually pushed forward together.
In 2022 we’ve introduced many new and significant features, and I wanted just to shine a light on three important ones here.
interACT - our cross-platform interactive shell, which provides a wide range of commands to allow file and directory actions, listing processes/services, downloading and uploading files, and running OSQuery for detailed investigation and containment activities. It quickly became a much-loved and relied-on feature.
macOS - many of our customers requested for us to support more operating systems, and this year we added macOS support - running on both Apple Silicon and legacy Intel-based Macs. It proved an instant hit and was a big boost for investigators, especially for enterprises based purely on Mac based or where they have adopted BYOD initiatives to support increased demand for remote working.
Cloud Forensics - no matter where your data is stored, we can now enumerate evidence across multiple cloud endpoints. Offering our customers coverage on their AWS and Azure assets, with even more cloud support planned for the near future. Again, a heavily requested feature that we were excited to deliver for our customers.
Our growth throughout 2022 has enabled us to be active in more markets than ever before, with an increased presence in North America, Europe, and APAC. This allows us to talk and listen to more people than ever before.
For 2023, we’re getting ready to fire up our rocket and deliver an even more aggressive rate of product innovation. I asked the team the question, ‘how can we meaningfully build upon the strong foundation we’ve already laid, keep the momentum going, and ensure we remain market-leading?”
Without totally spoiling all of our surprises for next year, I can share that we’ve already made significant progress on a new log analysis feature, again something our customers have been calling out for, and we’re developing the ability to deploy AIR over SaaS platforms, including the likes of G-Suite, Microsoft 365 and Slack.
The future looks extremely exciting, and none of this would have been possible without our team and an ever-growing number of amazing customers.
I wish you all a happy and fruitful year ahead, full of success and accomplishments.
