SpecterOps – a provider of adversary-focused cybersecurity solutions born out of unique insights of advanced threat actor tradecraft – announced it has raised $25 million in a Series A venture funding round led by Decibel. This funding round will accelerate the already significant adoption of BloodHound Enterprise (BHE), which is the industry’s first platform for comprehensively removing identity attack paths in Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) and Azure AD.
Plus the funding round will also expand company research and development initiatives. Other investors in this round include Kevin Mandia, the CEO and founder of Mandiant, as well as Jon Oberheide and Dug Song, the co-founders of Duo Security.
BloodHound Enterprise was launched in 2021 and it was inspired by the success of SpecterOps’s BloodHound free and open source software (FOSS) – which has become a popular tool for penetration testers and red teamers to identify Attack Paths within on-premises Active Directory and Azure AD cloud environments. This platform experienced rapid customer adoption last year with significant product revenue growth and new customer acquisition growing by over 600%. Now BloodHound Enterprise is used worldwide by companies like Capital Group, the University of Texas at Austin and Woodside Energy.
This funding round will also be used to expand SpecterOps’ services and training solutions, which have been equally successful. And SpecterOps employees have made over 400 security community contributions, created 93 open-source security tools, trained over 6,900 students in their adversary-focused training courses, and helped more than 185 customers with adversary simulation and detection assessments.
This funding news was on the heels of the latest version of BloodHound FOSS (v4.3), which is available now and includes new Azure Attack Paths covering MS Graph app role assignments, Function Apps, Logic Apps, automation accounts, Azure Kubernetes clusters, and virtual machine scale sets. And the funding will be used to expand BloodHound FOSS development and grow the BloodHound community, and support new open-source projects and give back to the security community at large.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’ve seen incredible growth in the past year as enterprises recognize the need for practical solutions to identity-based threats. Our approach with BloodHound Enterprise is unique because rather than focusing on controlling access, we treat the identity ecosystem as a networked graph, mapping attack paths continuously in the same manner that bad actors test the soft spots of a corporate ecosystem. This new funding will enable us to further invest in R&D, grow our team, deliver powerful new features to customers, expand our consulting and training teams, and take our research and open-source projects to the next level.”
– David McGuire, CEO at SpecterOps
“Identities are now the connective tissue to corporate systems and data, and attackers are well aware of the power of these pathways. We need to think like attackers do, in complex graphs instead of lists. Identity Access Management is great for managing access, but preventing abuse is just as critical,” explains Sakoda. “The SpecterOps team deeply understands the security risks of access, not only because of their experience inside the minds of hackers, but from their years of research from the widely used BloodHound open-source project. We are proud to invest in this incredible team as they pioneer this identity-focused security solution.”
– Decibel Founder and Partner Jon Sakoda
“SpecterOps fully understands the complexity of the modern threat landscape. The tools they have built and their approach to Attack Path Management can make dramatic improvements to Active Directory security.”
– Kevin Mandia, SpecterOps investor and Mandiant CEO and founder
