Former Israeli Military Intel Agents Launch Security Startup

Another security startup has emerged from stealth mode, and this one has its roots in Israeli military intelligence operations. Cybereason, with $4.6 million in Series A funding, was founded by members of the Israeli Intelligence Corps and focuses on an attacker's behavior and modes of operation to mitigate the damage of a hack.

"In order to truly understand a hacking operation, you need to track and understand those guys doing the actions or malicious operations," says Lior Div, co-founder and CEO, who received the Medal of Honor from the Israeli Intelligence Corps. Div specializes in forensics, reverse engineering, malware analysis, cryptography, and evasion techniques. "The main thing is what actions they are taking inside the network and what is the intent."

Cybereason, which has been working with early adopter customers in the U.S. and Israel and plans a commercial release shortly, uses a combination of endpoint and network activity monitoring and big data analysis. "We imitate the way [attackers] think and the system actively looks for clues in the environment" of an attacker, Div says. That could be an end user working at off hours or an IT pro using different tools, or a user's camera opening on his machine in a session that doesn't correlate with Skype, for example.

An endpoint agent collects the activity information and sends it to Cybereason's main server, which can be configured on premise or in the cloud. "We visualize it for them so they can consume the information in a very easy way. We try to avoid graphs and tables" and instead present a more easily digestible picture of the attack, he says. The platform also provides a timeline of the anomalous activity, as well as point-and-click remediation options.

Div's fellow co-founder and CTO Yonatan Striem-Amit is a machine learning, big data analytics and visualization technology expert. Yossi Naar, co-founder and chief vision officer, is a software architect who has designed security platforms for the defense industry.

"Organizations don't have the right personnel for cybersecurity today. We are empowering the guys there, to make an IT guy an expert and give him the ability to fight back against malops [malicious operations]," Div says.

"Cybereason addresses advanced targeted attacks at multiple levels," says Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

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