Cyber-security vendor Cytegic today is announcing that it is raising a $3 million round of angel funding, bringing total funding to date to $6 million. With the new funding, the Israel-based company will seek to increase the traction it has built in the U.S. market.
Cytegic is led by a noteworthy pair of Israeli security professionals: CEO Shay Zandani founded the Israeli Air Force’s Information Warfare department, and Cytegic’s Executive Chairman Carmi Gillon once ran Israel’s Shabak domestic intelligence agency.
The new round of angel funding comes from several sources, including Ambassador Stuart A. Bernstein (Ret.), chairman emeritus of The Bernstein Companies LLC; and Kenneth L. Stein, partner and IP law expert at Greenfield Stein & Senior, LLP.
“The funding will be shared between development efforts to align the products to U.S. customer needs and at the same time to capitalize on the U.S. market traction we are getting,” Zandani told eWEEK.
Cytegic has three core products, DyTA for Dynamic Trend Analysis, CyMA for cyber maturity assessment and the Cyber Decision Support System (CDSS). The DyTA platform collects data on an organization from multiple sources, according to Zandani.
“It [DyTA] uses both our proprietary crawler that scrapes data from more than 1,000 cyber-attack-specific public and open-source Websites, including news sites, forums, blogs, social media accounts, etc., and an API for integration of third-party intelligence vendors,” he said. “The information is continuously processed and analyzed to identify activity patterns and trends.”
DyTA is also able to forecast risks and threats to an organization by performing big data statistical analysis on the accumulated data to identify trends and project them into the near future. In addition, DyTA identifies patterns of behavior of attackers and attack methods surrounding external events (holidays, memorial days, military conflicts, stock downfall, etc.) and catalogs them based on type and calendar, Zandani said.
“The system then correlates between the projected trend line and the patterns in the coming weeks in order to produce a refined forecast,” he said. “Moreover, these patterns are stored and when a new activity starts to take shape, the system identifies that it matches a known trend/pattern and adjusts the forecast accordingly.”
The CyMA cyber maturity assessment technology is able to map Cytegic’s indicators of maturity to most leading compliance standards, including ISO 27000, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Zandani said that the CyMA can deliver specific high-level reports on compliance for organizations.
CDSS provides multiple capabilities, including a simulation engine for potential attacks. The system can simulate for multiple attribute changes in the threat landscape, according to Zandani.
“Once a simulation is done, the system calculates the new risk levels for the business assets, the business environments and for the organization,” he said. “The simulation engine allows the customer to manually change the maturity score of the controls and examine what is the overall impact on risk reduction, or change the threat agent activity level to calculate the change in risks to the organization.”
One element that is not yet part of the Cytegic product platform is a remediation engine that ties the intelligence and risk to network assets such as a firewall or intrusion prevention system to help block attacks. Zandani noted that plans for remediation technology integration are on his roadmap.
Looking forward, Zandani said that his company is looking to make some major deals in the next couple of months in the U.S. and European Union, and should find either a strategic partner or an institutional round of double-digit funding to accelerate growth.
“We’re here to disrupt the market and to create a better and safer world for all of us,” Zandani said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.