Cybersecurity vendor Blackpoint Cyber has had two major milestones in 2025 – it changed CEOs and rolled out a new unified security platform.
In April, Blackpoint founder Jon Murchison stepped down as CEO to take an executive chairman role. The former NSA computer operations expert named former McAfee and NortonLifeLock executive Gagan Singh as his CEO successor. At the same time, Blackpoint was rolling out CompassOne, which the vendor describes as a unified security posture and response platform.
I recently spoke with Singh about his plans for leading Blackpoint Cyber, the significance of CompassOne and the increased role AI plays in cybersecurity.
What brought you to Blackpoint Cyber?
Singh: I had been chief operating officer at McAfee. And I tried retiring in 2023, and then realized very quickly that wasn't going to work. I decided to selectively look at opportunities. I wanted to do something that I could feel passionate about, something that spoke to me and had a mission behind it.
I was really impressed with what Jon and the team had built at BlackPoint. It was nation-state level protection to small businesses who don't often have access to those sophisticated technologies. And the MSP community is a special place. It was all exciting to me. They were kind enough to offer [the CEO job], and I was glad to accept.
What will Jon’s role be going forward?
Singh: Jon really wanted to just be with partners and help us continue to evolve our product direction. He's interacting with partners a lot more. He's going to partner events. He's obviously a great spokesperson for the company, given his background. He's still very heavily involved with our product evolution discussions.
What are your goals coming in from the outside. What's your vision for Blackpoint Cyber?
Singh: When I look at Blackpoint, I still feel like it’s one of the best kept secrets. Our CompassOne platform is a huge step in our evolution, we’re going from a sole MDR (managed detection and response) product to expanding our security footprint capabilities. We have to land that right.
The first rule is always, don't screw up what's working well. I would love to build upon what the team has already built, get our platform launch right, and as we get into next year, do a lot more go-to-market activities. We want to build more thought leadership and communicate at a higher level .
I don't have to tell you this, but there are many competing vendors in cybersecurity. What can you do to stand out?
Singh: I feel blessed that we have an incredible reputation as probably one of the best SOCs in the world. It was built by people who came in from nation state-defensive backgrounds and we've kind of built a moat around it, we protect it and we nurture it.
That's what we're known for. I wouldn’t credit the success of BlackPoint to marketing. I would say a lot of it was word of mouth and our partners telling each other “You really have to look at BlackPoint.” Then it’s a question of how do you package that, and how do you tell that story to a wider audience? We will continue to lean on our partners, because that word of mouth credibility as in the MSP space carries a lot of weight.
Gagan Singh
How much of your business goes through MSPs?
Singh: Almost all of it. Instead of creating channel conflict, we want to lean further into that presence and continue to grow there. I think as with Compass One, we're just able to have a much broader set of conversations around not just core MDR capabilities, but arouImage Captionnd features and capabilities far beyond that vulnerability management.
With CompassOne, did you tie together technologies you already had or did you have to develop new pieces?
Singh: We developed new pieces and we streamlined user experience. The way I think about a platform is that it's an enabler for you to build more capabilities in a more streamlined, easier way. So our velocity and in bringing new ideas and new capabilities to market goes up. It's a starting point where we're going to launch new capabilities on top of it, but it also enables us to do a whole lot more.
AI is playing a huge role security, both in the in tools and in the hackers’ world. What is BlackPoint doing around AI?
Singh: I'll digress for a second. In the Harry Potter series, the Prime Minister goes to the Minister of Magic, and says “You're the Minister of Magic, why can't you take down these guys? Just go swing a wand and fix it.” And the Minister of Magic says “That’s the problem, Mr. Prime Minister. They've got magic too, you know.”
It's been a cat-and-mouse game forever in cybersecurity. When email came along, you started getting the Nigerian prince emails, and suddenly that was the thing. And then as cloud computing became more pervasive, access to more compute power and brute force became easier. As you go from cloud computing to AI with social engineering and all these other things, testing different messages becomes easier. I would say AI has been fighting AI for a good six to eight years in this domain. It's not new.
Now with generative AI, these hackers are nation-state actors. There's financial gangs and other things. They're quite sophisticated. They've probably got engineering teams with A/B testing and marketing and other fully functioning organizations. The core defensive posture that we've embraced remains the same. You just have better tools at your disposal to do it. The ability to use machine learning has been around for 10 to 15 years. We have more sophisticated techniques to reduce your false positives. Then you have the next level, which is you get into agentic flows where you start adding a Copilot to a SOC analyst and those kinds of things. And then you have content generation and other things which are AI empowered more at the application layer, with various levels of maturity in all of them.
We continue to strongly believe that this is probably one of those domains where the human instinct is going to continue to dominate for a long period of time, but you need the right tools. I've always looked at AI as just another tool in your toolkit, a very valuable one, and one that is more readily accessible to the good guys and the bad guys. But fundamentally, the end customer’s problem hasn't changed – it’s “Am I protected or not?”