More than 50% of the world’s population is now online. And as online usage has increased, so has cybercrime.
Experts estimate that in 2021 alone, cybercrime may cost the global economy as much as $6 trillion US.
In July 2020, Klaus Schwab – the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum – said in a speech that “We all know, but still pay insufficient attention, to the frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber-attack, which would bring to a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyber-attack”.
Indeed, as recently as December 2020, even the American cybersecurity firm FireEye was hacked. Complex operational (software) tools were stolen – tools that it uses to test government clients’ defences.
In other words – the hackers now have a potent collection of new techniques to draw upon, to use against other businesses, banks, governments or anyone else they choose.
So what can you do to protect yourself, your computer systems and your valuable, sensitive data?
Fortunately, there are many ‘good guys’ out there who are working hard to produce a variety of tailored solutions to the problems of cyber-attacks.
Here are a few more need-to-know facts:
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As one of the firms (Confluera) on this list states:
“Modern-day cyber-attacks need modern-day solutions”
So here is our roundup of what the experts in the industry consider some of the best Startups currently working in cybersecurity.
BitSight
BitSight is a platform that rates companies’ security effectiveness daily using a data-driven, outside-in approach. BitSight transforms how organizations manage information security risk. Organizations worldwide, including seven of the top 10 cyber insurers, 20% of Fortune 500 companies, and 3 of the top 5 investment banks use BitSight’s proven Security Ratings technology daily, to make integral risk and business decisions. With over 1,000 customers and the largest ecosystem of users and information, BitSight is the most widely used Security Ratings Service.
Carbon Black – by VMWare
Carbon Black (by VMWare) is a leading provider of next-generation endpoint security. They serve more than 4,300 customers globally, including 35 of the Fortune 100. As a cybersecurity innovator, Carbon Black has pioneered multiple endpoint security categories, including application control, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and next-generation antivirus (NGAV). Leveraging its big data and analytics cloud platform – the CB Predictive Security Cloud – Carbon Black solutions enable customers to defend against the most advanced cyber threats, including malware, ransomware, and non-malware attacks. Deployed via the cloud, on-premises or as a managed service, customers use Carbon Black solutions to lock down critical systems, hunt threats, and replace legacy antivirus.
Ben Johnson, Michael Viscuso, Todd Brennan
Total funding: $191.7m
Web: www.carbonblack.com
Concentric AI
Concentric’s Semantic Intelligence solution delivers data risk insights across the entire inventory of sensitive documents in the cloud and on-premises. Its deep learning technology examines each document’s content and context for efficient actionable security. It scans the documents, identifies sensitive or business-critical data, evaluates the risk each document poses and highlights critical concerns that need immediate attention.
Confluera
Confluera is a cybersecurity startup helping organizations find sophisticated security attacks going on inside their corporate infrastructures. The startup delivers solutions that stop and remediate cyber threats in real-time. They are built to detect and stop attackers from navigating infrastructure. Their solutions free up human security personnel to focus on more important work, instead of spending hours trying to join the dots between the thousands of alerts they receive daily many of which are false positives.
Abhijit Ghosh, Bipul Sinha, Niloy Mukherjee
Total funding: $29m
Web: www.confluera.com
Cyber Armor
CyberArmor empowers DevOps teams to seamlessly deploy natively zero-trust workloads across all environments. CyberArmor provides a Zero-Trust Identity based service-to-service visibility and security control plane for cloud-native, data centre and hybrid environments. The CyberArmor control plane brings together data protection and workload protection. The company patent-pending technology utilises stealth coding and moving target defence mechanisms to assure a strong Code-DNA based cryptographic identity and data protection throughout the entire workload lifecycle.
Benyamin Hirschberg, Leonid Sandler, Shauli Rozen
Total funding: Undisclosed
Web: www.cyberarmor.io
Cyberreason
Cybereason is the leader in endpoint protection, offering endpoint detection and response, next-generation antivirus, and managed monitoring services. Founded by elite intelligence professionals born and bred in offence-first hunting, Cybereason gives enterprises the upper hand over cyber adversaries. The Cyberreason platform is powered by a custom-built in-memory graph, the only truly automated hunting engine anywhere. It detects behavioural patterns across every endpoint and surfaces malicious operations in an exceptionally user-friendly interface.
Darktrace
Darktrace was founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge. Its self-learning AI is modelled on the human immune system and used by over 3,500 organizations to protect against threats to the cloud, email, IoT, networks and industrial systems. This includes insider threat, industrial espionage, IoT compromises, zero-day malware, data loss, supply chain risk and long-term infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Dave Palmer, Emily Orton, Jack Stockdale, Nicole Eagan, Poppy Gustafsson
Total funding: $230.5m
Web: www.darktrace.com
DataFleets
DataFleets is a privacy-preserving data engine that unifies distributed data for rapid access, agile analytics, and automated compliance. The platform provides data scientists and developers with a “data fleet” that allows them to create analytics, ML models, and applications on highly sensitive data sets without ever having explicit access to the data. Each data fleet has easy-to-use APIs, and under-the-hood they ensure data protection using advances in federated computation, transfer learning, encryption, and differential privacy. DataFleets helps organizations overcome the struggle between data privacy and innovation by helping them maintain data protection standards for compliance while accelerating data science initiatives.
Duo Security
Duo Security provides a cloud-based access protection solution for companies and organizations worldwide. Clients use its solution for adaptive authentication, BYOD (bring your own device) security, cloud security, endpoint security, mobile security, and two-factor authentication. Duo Security also offers Duo Managed Service Provider (MSP), a program that provides MSPs with tools to protect their customers from data breaches. Clients can deploy its technology to protect users, data, and applications from breaches, credential theft, and account takeover.
Freevolt – Drayson Technologies Group
Trading as Freevolt, this is a technology company developing power harvesting solutions to convert RF energy into usable DC through our proprietary technology: Freevolt. Freevolt’s mission in the smart card space is to enable fraud protection and improved security without any impact on existing infrastructure or user experience. Spun out from work done at Imperial College London, and developed over 7 years, Freevolt is a global award-winning suite of proprietary, patented and patent-pending technologies that recycle and harvest RF energy from radio transmission networks (NFC, cellular, Wi-Fi, etc.) to power devices such as smart cards, sensors, and wearables. Smart Cards are their lead commercial application.
Havoc Shield
Havoc Shield is a fast and effective cybersecurity program for small and medium businesses (SMBs). They provide comprehensive security and compliance features to protect against phishing, data breaches, dark web attacks and more. Meeting the standards of Fortune 100 companies for security, they can make it easier for SMBs to gain business contracts with these top companies. “Cybersecurity for the little guy”.
Illumio
Illumio is a cloud security company that stops cyber threats of unauthorized communications through adaptive segmentation. It is a data centre and cloud security company led by veterans with deep experience in virtualisation, networking, and security – hailing from industry leaders such as VMware, Cisco, Juniper, McAfee, and Nicira.
JupiterOne
JupiterOne is a security product designed to help organizations manage their cloud-based infrastructure. It reduces the cost and complexity of cloud security, replacing guesswork with granular data about cyber assets and configurations. Its software helps security operations teams shorten the path to security and compliance and improve their overall posture through continuous data aggregation and relationship modelling across all assets.
Lightspin
The youngest startup on our list, Lightspin was created to solve one problem – security in the cloud. Although the cloud offers business and individuals convenience, flexibility and more, it also offers a host of new security challenges. The complexities of the shared security model, plus the ease with which cloud configuration vulnerabilities can occur, mean that these environments are at great risk to threats. As their website explains: Your native, Kubernetes, and microservices are the core of your infrastructure. Lightspin is the comprehensive, intuitive, and effortless protection you need to keep them secured along your digital transformation.
LogRhythm
LogRhythm is a world leader in NextGen SIEM, empowering thousands of enterprises on six continents to successfully reduce cyber and operational risk by rapidly detecting, responding to and neutralizing damaging cyberthreats. LogRhythm’s technology serves as the foundation for the world’s most modern enterprise security operations centres (SOCs), helping customers measurably secure their cloud, physical, and virtual infrastructures for both IT and OT environments. Built for security professionals by security professionals, the LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform has won countless customer and industry accolades.
Netsparker
Netsparker is an easy-to-use and highly accurate web application security solution for all types of web applications. The combination of dead accurate scanning with proprietary automatic exploitation technology brought Netsparker early success, and the company is now a recognized leading player in the web application security industry. Netsparker can identify vulnerabilities in all types of modern web applications, regardless of the underlying architecture or platform.
Rapid7
Rapid7 is a provider of security data and analytics solutions enabling organizations to implement an active approach to cybersecurity. Rapid7’s simple and innovative solutions are used by more than 2,500 enterprises and government agencies in more than 65 countries, while the company’s free products are downloaded more than one million times per year and enhanced by more than 200,000 members of its open-source security community. Rapid7 has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing security companies by Inc. Magazine.
SailPoint Technologies
SailPoint is an identity and access management provider that helps organizations deliver and manage user access from any device. Its products include IdentityIQ, which is an identity governance solution that gives enterprises the visibility into and control over user access and streamlines complex processes; IdentityIQ Compliance Manager, which integrates access certification, policy enforcement, and activity monitoring capabilities and automates the auditing, reporting, and management activities; and IdentityIQ Role Manager that helps organizations to create, enforce, and verify role-based access in enterprise applications.
Snyk
Snyk helps software-driven organizations find and fix vulnerabilities in open source dependencies and container images. The company is a developer-first security company that helps organizations use open-source code and stay secure. The startup provides a tool that is used by developers to scan their code for vulnerable open-source components. Most enterprise applications incorporate open-source components and consequently are vulnerable to any security exploits that may be hiding in those files.
Telesign
TeleSign is a provider of single-platform global communications and trusted identity data solutions. TeleSign’s cloud communications platform pinpoints and eliminates fake accounts, employs two-factor authentication, reduces transaction fraud, guards against account takeover, streamlines account registration and sends customer alerts and notifications. It connects and protects online experiences with sophisticated customer identity and engagement solutions. Through APIs that deliver user verification, data insights, and communications it solves today’s unique customer challenges by bridging your business to the complex world of global telecommunications.
Darren Berkovitz, Ryan Disraeli, Stacy Stubblefield
Total funding: $78m
Web: www.telesign.com
Tessian
Tessian protects every business’s mission by securing the human layer. Using machine learning technology, Tessian automatically predicts and eliminates advanced threats on email caused by human error – like data exfiltration, accidental data loss, business email compromise and phishing attacks – with minimal disruption to employees’ workflow. As a result, employees are empowered to do their best work, without security getting in their way.
Ubiq Security
Ubiq is a technology company that has simplified the complex and messy world of encryption through a set of APIs, that are simple enough for any developer to use, yet scalable and extensible enough to encrypt data effortlessly across diverse applications and programming languages, cloud environments, and storage types. By enabling developers to quickly integrate encryption into their applications, Ubiq is empowering innovators around the world to efficiently build more secure products and experiences.
Varonis
Varonis Systems provides actionable data governance solutions for financial services, healthcare, energy, manufacturing and tech companies. Varonis provides an innovative software platform that allows enterprises to map, analyze, manage and migrate their unstructured data. Varonis specializes in human-generated data, a type of unstructured data that includes an enterprise’s spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, audio files, video files, emails, text messages and any other data created by employees. This data often contains an enterprise’s financial information, product plans, strategic initiatives, intellectual property and numerous other forms of vital information.
Webroot
Webroot provides intelligent endpoint protection and threat intelligence services to secure the Internet of Everything. By leveraging its cloud-based collective threat intelligence platform, computers, tablets, smartphones, and more are protected from malware and other cyber-attacks. Webroot technology is trusted and integrated into market-leading companies including Cisco, F5 Networks, HP, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, RSA, Aruba, and many more.
Zero Networks
Zero Networks automates the development and enforcement of network access rules throughout an entire network. Its technology customizes who can access what is in a network by learning how users and machines communicate. Zero Networks provides a bypass mechanism through a two-factor authentication wall on users’ mobile phones, ensuring unusual but legitimate connections are not affected. With Zero Networks, there are no agents to deploy, no policies to configure, just airtight security for all users and machines
Data source: crunchbase.com
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