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At the young age of only nine years-old, Nir Gaist was already running a cyber-security company in Israel, providing penetration services to customers. Gaist is no longer nine (he’s 28) and he’s not just operating a company in Israel either. On Jan. 12, Gaist’s company Nyotron officially expanded into the U.S, bringing its Paranoid platform of cybersecurity technologies along with it.
Nyotron is Gaist’s most recent company and launched in Israel back in 2013 with the promise of bringing a next generation end-point security platform to market, that can defend against unknown threats.
“There are an infinite number of problems in cyber-security,” Gaist told eWEEK.
Gaist noted that threats are always evolving with attackers developing new malware every day. On the other side of the equation, Chief Security Officers (CSO’s) realize that there is an ever-growing volume of threats, but they simply cannot buy every security product, to solve every possible problem.
“Our mission is to develop a threat-agnostic defense approach,” Gaist explained. “That means we have the ability to detect and prevent every type of threat, without any prior knowledge about the specific threat.”
The product that enables Nyotron’s threat agnostic defense is aptly called ‘Paranoid’ and Gaist claims it is able to detect all types of threats. The way Paranoid works, is that the system understands all the different ways that a computer system may be harmed.
“So instead of running after exploits and vulnerabilities, which might well be infinite, we discovered that the way to use vulnerabilities is actually very limited,” Gaist said.
Common actions that a vulnerability might perform include creating, moving or deleting files as well as creating an external communications channel. Gaist explained that Nyotron has created its own patented programming language called the Behavior Pattern Map (BPM) to identify and map all of the legitimate ways to perform system actions.
For example, in the case of file deletion, Nyotron maps all the different authorized ways that a file can legitimately be deleted on a system.
“Basically what we’re saying is while the bad is infinite, the good is finite and we’re focusing on mapping all the good ways to do things on a computer,” Gaist said.
Gaist emphasized that the BPM approach is disconnected from any specific form of threat research. Rather the goal is to fully understand what normal activity looks like. BPM creates a correlation between system calls and user actions.
From a product deployment perspective, the Paranoid agent is installed on every end-point an organization wants to protect. Additionally, there is a server component that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, that gathers information and manages the end-point agents.
Nyotron also has the Paranoid War Room, which Gaist referred to as Nyotron’s premium management system. The Paranoid War Room provides broad visibility across a network and includes full reporting capabilities. Gaist added that Nyotron has a managed services offering available as well that monitors customer environments, as well as providing incident response capabilities.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.