Bitdefender Shapes Modern Cloud Security Solutions

Exclusive interview with Mr. Raphaël Peyret, Director of Product Management — Cloud Security, BitDefender

What is Bitdefender’s main objective at GITEX this year?  

GITEX is a great opportunity to meet not only our end customers but also partners. We are a channel company and we sell exclusively through partners. Hence, it’s great to have partners from all over the region all over the world come to us so that we can connect again in person. We are also presenting some of our newer products and offerings. For example, this year we launched a new cloud security offering. Talking about some of our innovations in risk management, we announced something called PHASR recently. So those are going to be some big, big things that we hope to spread the word about.

As a cybersecurity company, how Bitdefender keep itself ahead of the competition?

Every company in the space has its own angle on this. And for us, our angle is its technology. We’re a technology company at heart, our founder, founded Bitdefender 23 years ago. He’s a university professor, and we have 50% of our teams working on R&D. We are not a marketing company. We are a technology company and that comes across in our products, where technically speaking we are really, really good. We have got people doing reverse engineering of malware, working with the FBI, with INTERPOL, as well as building the B2B products that you will see here. Under the hood, there’s a ton of work on core technology.

Right now, a lot of companies are moving toward having cloud security. What is Bitdefender doing in this sector/market?

At Bitdefender, we recognize that while the cloud requires a tailored approach, it cannot be treated as entirely separate from other environments. Attackers won’t stop at the cloud’s edge, so isolated approaches only create exploitable silos. That’s why our cloud security platform and cloud-native application protection are integrated into our broader security framework. Our capabilities correlate data and responses across all environments—cloud, endpoints, email, mobile, or IoT. This unified approach ensures comprehensive threat prevention, detection, and response, following attackers wherever they move.

How are you utilizing AI and machine learning in enhancing your threat detection capabilities?

We often get asked about AI and machine learning, especially now, but for our technical teams, it’s nothing new—it’s like discussing computing itself. Bitdefender has been leveraging machine learning on endpoints for over a decade. Instead of just claiming “we have AI,” we deploy a vast range of models fine-tuned for different security needs, including machine learning, heuristics-based, and generative models. These aren’t just buzzwords; each model serves a specific security purpose, optimized through rigorous R&D. In 2017, a new ransomware was blocked by a 2014 model—demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, every device with our protection uses its own customized AI model, meaning we effectively deploy millions of unique models tailored to individual devices.

Considering that hackers are aware of cybersecurity measures from companies like Bitdefender, are they constantly innovating new tactics to bypass these defenses?

Hackers driven by financial gain often target more vulnerable systems because they offer easier access with lower investment. If defenses are strong enough to make hacking unprofitable, attackers tend to move on. Despite this, hackers continue to innovate, particularly in malware and ransomware. For instance, they increasingly use harder-to-reverse-engineer languages like Rust to slow down security teams’ efforts to create decryptors. They also explore advanced cryptography, anticipating quantum computing’s potential to break traditional security methods. This constant evolution creates a cat-and-mouse dynamic; the goal remains to make attacks so costly that cybercriminals are deterred.

Do you also consider the perspective and strategies of hackers when developing your security measures?

Of course and in fact the services that we offer include penetration testing and red teaming. Red teaming is the one that’s really the closest to the hacker mindset. Because organizations will come and say. “Here are our crown jewels. Here’s the safe. Here are the rules of the game. You’re not allowed to, beat my CEO up. Everything else is on the table. Break in and tell me how you did it.” And so for that, we basically have the white-hat hackers, the good hackers. They hack you so that you know how another hacker would do it and that you can block. We do that. And of course, it’s important not to separate from the hacker mindset for doing cybersecurity properly. Because otherwise, you’re blind to where the risks actually are.