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Venture Capital News: Cybereason Emerges with $4.6M in Series A

2014-02-11
CAMBRIDGE, MA, Innovative technology platform to proactively detect and terminate Malops has raised $4.6 million in Series A funding from Charles River Ventures.
Cybereason Inc. today emerges from stealth mode with the launch of an innovative technology platform to proactively detect and terminate Malops™ - malicious operations perpetrated by sophisticated hackers carrying out cybercrimes within enterprises. The Cybereason Platform delivers protection from Malops by automatically detecting the hacker's actions and intentions through continuous monitoring of systems across the enterprise. This empowers CISOs and security analysts to proactively identify and eradicate Malops in real time. See the 'How Hacking Operations Work' video at https://vimeo.com/85874023.

Founded by elite members of the Israeli intelligence agency, the company has built the Cybereason Platform from its deep knowledge and first-hand expertise in cracking and reverse engineering the world's most complex hacking operations. Cybereason has raised $4.6 million in Series A funding from Charles River Ventures (CRV) to execute its go-to-market strategy.

'CRV has a history of backing industry-defining companies. The Cybereason team brings a unique approach and fresh insights to a market that today doesn't have effective solutions and where the damage is measured in many billions of dollars. Cybereason is positioned to lead the industry in addressing cyberattacks in the most effective way, and in doing so, define a new market,' said Izhar Armony, partner at Charles River Ventures.

A New Approach to Cybersecurity

Concentrating resources and spend on adversaries or malware has been ineffective. Tracking actions and intent is critical to uncovering cyberattacks in real time, before damage. Cybereason has defined a new approach by detecting Malops that comprise distinct phases within hacking operations with intermediate goals. This approach fills the gap between penetration and damage by continuously monitoring the IT infrastructure, visually describing the Malops in context and enabling security analysts to stop the hacking operation. For more details, see the Malop market brief at www.cybereason.com/press/malop_market_brief.pdf.

'Part of the answer to the seemingly insurmountable problem of how to identify attacks without signature-based mechanisms lies in pervasive monitoring to identify meaningful deviations from normal behavior to infer malicious intent. If you assume systems will be compromised with advanced targeted threats, then information security efforts need to shift to detailed, pervasive and context-aware monitoring to detect these threats,' wrote Neil MacDonald, vice president, distinguished analyst and Gartner fellow emeritus at Gartner Inc. in his report, Prevention is Futile in 2020: Protect Information Via Pervasive Monitoring and Collective Intelligence.1

Cybereason Founding Team and Expertise

'As a result of the forensic expertise of the Cybereason team, this software's ability to detect and intuitively display malicious activity without relying on predetermined signatures is by far one of the most exciting recent advancements I've seen in the information security space,' said Vanessa Pegueros, deputy CISO at DocuSign.

The Cybereason founding team brings a unique and powerful set of skills and a different way of thinking about cybercrime based on years of analyzing and executing against hacker operations and bringing enterprise security products to market. Lior Div, co-founder and chief executive officer, received the Medal of Honor from the head of the Intelligence Corps for his work. He is an expert in the fields of hacking operations, forensics, reverse engineering and malware analysis, cryptography and evasion. Yonatan Striem-Amit, co-founder and chief technology officer, is a recognized security expert in machine learning, big data analytics and visualization technologies. Yossi Naar, co-founder and chief vision officer, is an accomplished software architect with extensive experience designing security platforms for the defense industry as well as big data platforms for search engine marketing.

Cybereason Platform

Cybereason's platform discerns anomalies and distinguishes between the benign and the pernicious. The system collects specific information and combines analysis of big data algorithms along with proprietary knowledge enriched with external databases and intelligence. With powerful visual reconstruction of cyberattacks, Cybereason allows the experienced and novice users to understand the context of the attack and react quickly and effectively.

'As the frequency and sophistication of attacks facing organizations increases, relying on incident response teams to understand and prevent them from spreading in early phases can be futile; an automated technology approach like Cybereason's is better suited to help in the early detection of the most insidious attacks, especially as they are first spreading across endpoints and the network,' said René Bonvanie, CMO at Palo Alto Networks.

The Cybereason Platform has been deployed in several early access sites in the United States and Israel, successfully identifying the most advanced and targeted attacks, such as Flame, Doqu and Stuxnet; reconstructing their impact, spread and behavior; and enabling the shutdown of Malops.

'Cybereason addresses advanced targeted attacks at multiple levels,' said Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. 'Cybereason combines its experience, security, visualization and automation expertise with big data security analytics to help customers detect and respond to hacking operations. This increases the efficiency of highly skilled security analysts and enables less-experienced security analysts to triage Malop response.'

About Cybereason Inc.

Cybereason delivers a proprietary technology platform that automatically uncovers malicious operations (Malops™) and reconstructs them as a clear image of a cyberattack in context. This enables enterprises to discover sophisticated targeted threats at a very early stage, disrupt them at the stem and significantly reduce the costs and damages caused by such attacks. Cybereason is headquartered in Cambridge, MA with offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, please visit www.cybereason.com, www.twitter.com/Cybereason, www.facebook.com/Cybereason, and www.linkedin.com/company/Cybereason.
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