Cybereason Raises $25M Because Corporate Security Is Broken

As data breaches expose millions of U.S. health records and cyber attacks threaten to cause an accidental nuclear war, security tech is more relevant than ever.

Cybereason, an Israeli startup that provides real-time cyber attack detection and response tech for the enterprise, is the latest company to tap into the heightened fear around security breaches. They’ve just closed $25 million in Series B funding led by Spark Capital with participation from strategic investor Lockheed Martin and current backer CRV.

Cybereason has built a cyber defense product for business people, not just security experts. With a team made up of just as many designers and communications experts as engineering and security professionals, their primary concern is creating a product that businesses can understand.

“If you’ve ever seen a security product, it’s always gobbedly-gook and you never really know what’s going on — but these guys are different, they give you a really amazing graphical interface that is like a consumer product,” says Santo Politi of Spark Capital, who is joining the Cybereason board.

Dashboard screenshot

Behind the streamlined dashboard is a big data-driven engine that pulls in all of an organization’s daily operations and relationships. By processing and analyzing that data in real-time, Cybereason is able to build a holistic user profile and flag any unusual activity for investigation.

If the system determines that a company is being attacked, Cybereason provides the user with a comprehensive summary of the breach: the root cause, the timeline, who is involved, what tools they are using, and what kind of information is being transmitted in and out of the organization — the “five pillars,” according to founder Lior Div.

Prior to founding Cybereason, Div spent six years serving in the Israeli army’s 8200 Unit, the elite security division that’s comparable to our NSA. He then worked as a private contractor for the government where he specialized in reverse engineering hacking operations.

“Our assumption is that companies cannot recruit the right people to do this job, and even when they can, it doesn’t scale,” says Div.

“The amount of information and cross-correlation that they need to do in real-time to understand if they’re under attack is impossible,” he says.

The scary part is that companies often don’t realize they’ve been hacked until the damage has been done. Div says that during one of his early product demos for a private defense contractor, Cybereason identified a full-blown attack by the Chinese — ten thousand usernames and passwords were leaked, and the attackers had access to nearly half of the organization on a daily basis.

The security breach was too sensitive to be shared with the press, but Div says that the FBI was involved and that the company had no indication that they were being hacked until Cybereason detected it.

The unnamed contractor is now one of the roughly 20 organizations across the defense, finance, manufacturing, and pharma industries that Cybereason has signed up since launching out of stealth in February of last year. With the boost in funding, the company will invest heavily in sales and marketing as well as continued R&D.