After a hack at Equifax potentially put the information of 143 million U.S. consumers at risk, Palo Alto Networks Chairman and CEO Mark McLaughlin shed light on the measures the firm could have taken to ensure it was protected.

“Companies have been running very siloed, disparate capabilities for a very long time, and that’s what we invented, was the whole idea to say, ‘That’s not the way to do it. You need this stuff to be automated and orchestrated and take the humans out of the process so somebody doesn’t have to get alerted and go fix something somewhere,'” McLaughlin told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in an exclusive Wednesday interview on “Mad Money.”

One of Palo Alto’s top preventative recommendations is for companies to use “highly automated prevention,” which automatically updates and fixes vulnerabilities or problems across their networks, the CEO said.

Often times, a company’s cybersecurity system may know the answer to a problem, but won’t be able to deliver it to the proper endpoints because its networks are outdated, McLaughlin added.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s education institutions, governments, enterprises – everybody’s suffering from the same problem, which is historical in nature. It’s not because people didn’t know what they were doing. They really didn’t have any choice,” he told Cramer.

But all in all, when hacks happen, cybersecurity firms shouldn’t race to broadcast their efforts to the victim organizations, McLaughlin said.

“What happens when you have major breaches like this, first thing is we don’t chase the ambulance. Nobody in companies appreciates that, so if your security company’s dialing in the next day saying, ‘First of all, I could definitely have stopped that for you’ or something along those lines, you’re going to be ignored,” he said. “After the fire is out and you’re thinking about the architectural design for the future, that’s where we get to come into play.”

Source: Tech CNBC
'Don't chase the ambulance:' Palo Alto Networks CEO speaks out on the epic Equifax breach