BLACK HAT USA — Black Hat USA 2022 kicked off Wednesday in Las Vegas with a flurry of news and research from DNSFilter, NetWitness, BlackBerry, CrowdStrike and more.

The event marks the 25th year for Black Hat USA. Chris Krebs, the first director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), will give the opening keynote.

DNSFilter announced its acquisition of Guardian, a firewall and VPN technology platform. The acquisition allows DNSFilter to provide a secure web gateway (SWG) that protects user information and secures organizations against web-based threats.

More than 2,500 MSPs globally use DNSFilter’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered DNS threat protection and content filtering.

Ken Carnesi is DNSFilter’s CEO and co-founder.

DNSFilter’s Ken Carnesi

“Our partners will benefit from the increased security capabilities (e.g. URL filtering) that will come with this acquisition,” he said. “In addition, they will also have additional value-added products (e.g. the Guardian App which includes VPN capabilities).”

Bringing the DNSFilter and Guardian teams together creates a “unique security and privacy advantage with some of the top thought leaders,” Carnesi said.

“We already have a very large team dedicated to researching DNS-based threats,” he said “This acquisition will broaden our team’s scope of knowledge with security experts from other disciplines.

Scroll through our slideshow above for more from DNSFilter, and more news and research at Black Hat USA 2022.

(Informa Tech is the parent company of both Channel Futures and Black Hat USA.)