CryptoMove, a new security startup emerging from stealth today, has a different view of data security. Instead of simply encrypting, monitoring or recording it; the early-stage startup breaks the data into pieces and continually moves it around, making it virtually impossible for hackers to do anything with it should they get ahold of one of the pieces.
The company is having a big day today as it emerges from stealth with its first Beta product, graduates from the Alchemist Accelerator startup incubator, presents at the Alchemist Demo Day and officially announces a $1.5 million seed stage funding round that includes backing from Tim Draper’s Draper Associates VC-fund.
The startup, which is run by a father-son founding team, uses what they call an “active defense” approach they developed. The way it works is by breaking down the data into chunks, moving them around continuously, then putting the data back together when someone needs it. They claim restoring happens without any significant latency, and they can ensure that the data can be safely restored, by making copies of the data pieces, so should one node fail, the data can still be recovered.
While there have been tools that have done this kind of security at the file level, company CEO Mike Burshteyn says, what separates his company from that approach is they are installing their solution at the infrastructure level, letting you protect the data wherever it lives. What’s more, the pieces are continuously mutating, moving and changing. Even if you could collect the pieces, the shifting nature of the fragmentation puts up another hacking barrier, he explained.
“There is a long history of companies doing data fragmentation, but nobody continuously moving fragmented data [as we are],” Burshteyn said.
It was actually his father Boris Burshteyn, who developed the tech. Mike, who was working as a cyber-crime and data protection lawyer at Perkins Coie, joined his Dad to help take the tech Boris had developed and turn it into the Beta product they are announcing today.
The team bootstrapped the company for a couple of years. Today the company has 5 employees including the founding team. They plan to use the seed money to bring the product to market.
Cyber security is like a chess game, and as we have seen with high profile data breaches from the Democratic National Committee to Sony to OPM and JPMorgan over the last several years, hackers have time and again found ways to breach the current defenses.
It will take time to prove if CryptoMove’s approach can work at scale, but if it can, Mike believes it could be the start of an active defense trend. He and his investors are surely hoping that’s the case.