E8 Security announced on Oct. 11 a $12 million Series B round of funding, bringing total funding to date to $21.8 million. The company, which calls itself an innovator of behavioral intelligence for cyber-security, will use the new funding to help grow its sales, marketing and go-to-market efforts.
The funding was led by Strategic Cyber Ventures (SCV) and included the participation of March Capital Partners, Allegis Capital and The Hive.
“When we created SCV we decided that we would invest in intrusion suppression technologies,” Tom Kellerman, CEO of SCV, told eWEEK. “Intrusion suppression includes capabilities that can stop, detect and divert attacks from an elite hacker adversary.”
Kellerman joined SCV in February, having previously worked as chief technology officer of Trend Micro. SCV early on identified user behavior analytics as a capability that aligns with its intrusion suppression strategy, which is where E8 Security fits in, he said.
“With E8 it’s possible to detect and defend against attackers already inside an organization, in real time,” he said.
For SCV, the investment in E8 Security marks the second publicly announced investment so far in 2016. In April, SCV announced that it invested $5 million as part of an extended Series B round of funding for deception vendor TrapX.
The market for user behavior analytics is a growing one with multiple vendors, including Splunk, which recently released its User Behavior Analytics (UBA) 3.0 platform. Matt Jones, CEO of E8 Security, explained that his company aims to differentiate from others in the market by looking at other factors beyond just users, including network and endpoint traffic.
“Each source gives you a signal to look at,” Jones told eWEEK. “We take all the sources and combine them into what we call entity fusion, which provides a much better view of what is really going on in an organization.”
While users are a core focus for E8 Security, Jones emphasized that organizations don’t have a user behavior analytics problem; rather, the problem is understanding what’s running inside a network and how to stop rogue actions.
Although E8 Security can detect rogue actions, it doesn’t directly have remediation capabilities. Instead, E8 integrates with partner technologies to enable remediation. Among the company’s partnerships is Cisco, which has a technology called Identity Services Engine (ISE) that can take input from E8 to remediate a potential rogue user or action, Jones said.
“I came from Trend Micro, and we did a lot of great things there with reactive blocking and tackling of threats,” Kellerman said. “This [E8 Security] is anticipatory in nature.”
Looking at the technology inside of E8 Security, Jones said the company is making of use of what has now become a standard big data analytics stack across the security industry. The stack includes Apache Hadoop and Spark and then some machine learning capabilities on top.
Jones said that most of his customers want an on-premises technology. That said, E8 has done some proof-of-concept deployments in the cloud, and in 2017 Jones said it’s likely that E8 will have a formal cloud product.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.