- CyCognito, the developers of innovation that eliminate the world’s shadow risk, announced it raised $18 million in Series A funding
CyCognito — the developers of innovation that eliminate the world’s shadow risk — announced it has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with significant participation by Sorenson Ventures and a personal investment from John W. Thompson, venture partner at Lightspeed and Chairman of Microsoft. CyCognito also announced a next-generation platform to eliminate shadow risk,
The investors from the $5 million seed funding round also joined the Series A, including Sorenson Ventures, UpWest and Dan Scheinman. With this round of funding, CyCognito is going to evolve its SaaS platform — which is already in use by dozens of customers, including global financial, healthcare and hospitality organizations.
CyCognito’s platform fills a fundamental security gap representing a $50 billion US total addressable market today by identifying and eliminating shadow risk, an organization’s security blind spots. This gap has widened dramatically as organizations have transformed from operating with a well-defined perimeter to building hyperconnected, fluid IT ecosystems that span on-premises, cloud, partner and subsidiary environments. And CyCognito addresses this gap with a category-defining, transformative platform that automates offensive cybersecurity operations to provide reconnaissance capabilities superior to those of attackers.
“Our research and experience show that most organizations depend upon legacy security approaches that are unable to detect and pinpoint critical security risks yet, ironically, bad actors are able to search out and exploit these unprotected pathways with surprising ease,” said CyCognito CEO and co-founder Rob N. Gurzeev. “We and our investors are deeply committed to helping customers find the exposures that attackers can readily exploit but that internal security teams just can’t see.”
The initial uses of capital include expanding the CyCognito team across engineering and sales for addressing the market demand in the enterprise segment. And the funding will also be used for Customer Success to ensure seamless adoption, renewals and partnership with customers as they expand deployments. Plus it will be used for marketing to increase CyCognito brand awareness and generate additional demand.
“As enterprises have adopted the cloud, their security perimeter has evolved, which has exposed them to new threats. Their existing solutions were not built for today’s reality. CyCognito is a modern, automated platform that redefines the way brands protect themselves and their customers from today’s and tomorrow’s cyberattacks,” added Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
CyCognito was launched by veterans of national intelligence agencies who understand how attackers exploit blind spots that legacy approaches help create, and who recognized the need for a radical new approach to risk assessment.
“Protecting an organization from cyberattacks is one of the most challenging missions of this century,” explained Thompson. “Rob and Dima have leveraged their cybersecurity experience and combined it with internet-scale infrastructure to create a platform that can consistently outperform professional cybercriminals.”
CyCognito’s mission is to help organizations eliminate their most critical security risks — which are often unknown to them including assets and attack vectors that are part of the organization’s IT ecosystem but may not be managed by IT and security teams because they are in various cloud, partner, and subsidiary environments, or are abandoned.
“CyCognito holds a unique place in the cybersecurity solutions sector. Its platform identifies the unknown unknowns that every CISO fears, analyzes their risk and prioritizes them according to the business impact on the organization. This large-scale visibility and intelligence dramatically increases the efficiency of security teams and is an entirely new approach in the cybersecurity sector. The CyCognito team beats attackers at their own game, and we foresee strong market demand for this innovative reconnaissance and prioritization platform, which is more robust and capable than even the most sophisticated attacker methods,” commented Ken Elefant, Managing Director at Sorenson Ventures.
Next-Generation Platform To Eliminate Shadow Risk
CyCognito’s next-generation platform was launched with important new capabilities that enable organizations to fully identify and assess their organization’s attack surface. And the CyCognito platform continuously analyzes 3.5 billion internet-exposed assets and maps them to thousands of organizations — which yielded interesting research. Some organizations reported that they were effectively blind to as many as 75% of their assets prior to using the CyCognito platform.
“I want as much visibility as possible to understand what is going on in my network and systems. The last thing I want is finding out from a customer, law enforcement official, or other external party that we have an attacker. If I understand my risks, then I can manage them. Most of the time, it is the unknown “shadow risks” that kill you. That could be a forgotten server or cloud environment that goes unmanaged. Eliminating the unknowns is critical because that is where most attackers will go first,” stated James Christiansen, VP and Chief Information Security Officer of Teradata.
The platform maps all Internet-exposed assets in an organization, determines their business context, detects and prioritizes attack vectors, and recommends remediation steps. And it is the first platform to fully expose and map the organization’s entire attack surface, including assets that organizations don’t manage and may not even know to exist but that are readily identified by bad actors targeting the business, including assets that are part of third-party, partner, and subsidiary environments.
“The rise of shadow IT and the democratization of computing through increasingly flexible cloud computing options too often leave information security professionals in the dark when it comes to understanding their organization’s biggest cyber risks. Conventional risk discovery and assessment tools and practices haven’t kept pace with these changes, nor have they kept up with the changing threat landscape, leaving enterprises unwittingly exposed to attack. Borrowing a page from the darknet’s rent-a-botnet mode of operation allows infosec professionals to see their organization’s digital assets from a cyber criminal’s point of view to better shore up their defenses,” noted Paula Musich, Security and Risk Management Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates.
The CyCognito platform uses a unique reconnaissance process supported by a 60,000+ node botnet that surveils assets from multiple locations around the world — at multiple intervals — undetectably and non-intrusively, to reveal the full extent of the attack surface, including critical vectors that other solutions miss. And important new features in the platform enable customers to better avoid being breached due to their shadow risk, and further advances the platform’s unique ability to connect assets and their data with their business purpose and risk factors.
“Most organizations have expanded and broadly diversified their IT resources on-premises and in the cloud, making continuous monitoring and timely mitigation extremely challenging,” pointed out Dima Potekhin, CyCognito CTO and Co-Founder. “The inspiration for the CyCognito platform was the realization that the explosive growth in the numbers of threat actors and the sophistication of their tools has leapfrogged the capabilities of legacy security solutions and most of today’s enterprises, even those who are highly security aware.”
Some of the newly added features include the ability to automatically discover and associate all of the systems comprising a web application, including web servers, databases, load balancers, etc. — which reveals the business purpose of these assets thus highlighting the impact a compromise of the assets would have. And it also has new workflow integration features, including role-based access control to ensure differentiated access based on a user’s scope of responsibility. Plus it has an API for integrating into existing workflows.
