Ex-NSA Agents' Security Startup Lands $8 Million In Funding

Area 1 Security, a security startup created by three ex-NSA agents and pros from Disney and MIT, landed $8.5 million in its first round of funding today. The company launched in May with $2.5 million in seed funding.

The company's sweet spot is early-stage targeted attacks. It identifies malicious activity quickly, assesses it to determine which may pose the most sophisticated threat (for example, which has been launched by a nation-state), and stops attackers in their tracks before they can do real damage.

Area 1 does this through behavioral analysis. It collects data from a platform of sensors and looks for any abnormalities -- timing, content, user interaction, method of delivery, or anything else that might raise eyebrows or red flags.

"It's very hard to pretend to be normal," says Oren Falkowitz, founder and CEO of Area 1. No matter how clever an attack is, there are real people behind it, crafting a phishing message, making a plan, and unconsciously doing all sorts of subtle things that give them away.

Conventional security measures tend to discover attacks by looking for malware residue, so attackers can compromise an organization and lurk within it for 229 days, on average, before they're discovered, says Falkowitz. Area 1 Security's technology can shorten that time to discovery to minutes or hours.

The service doesn't stop there, though. Once it has given the company the bad news, Area 1 helps it decide how to remediate the problem. The new funding will largely go to improving that capability and making it more adaptable and user-friendly, says Falkowitz.

Since it launched, Area 1 has expanded from a team of five to a team of 13, adding talent from FireEye, Cisco, and others with strong operational experience in security. In response to comments that the recent mammoth attack on Sony was "unprecedented," Falkowitz dismissed that description. "Our team has seen these things before."

The Area 1 technology is not yet commercially available, but it is running a pilot program at a large financial institution.