Tag: cybersecurity

Backed by Accel Partners, Aorato Launches With Cybersecurity Platform For Active Directory

Today, cybersecurity startup Aorato comes out of stealth to launch internationally with a machine learning-based Directory Services Application Firewall (DAF) designed to ensure the security of Microsoft’s Active Directory protocol. Aorato’s proprietary graph database technology alerts security personnel to eccentricities specific to exchanges between Active Directory entities that may signal or prefigure a security violation. Aorato’s Directory Services Application Firewall iteratively learns from the results of previous analyses and subsequently builds entity profiles that not only identify security breaches retrospectively, but also predicts them based on probabilistic analysis of historical data.

Aorato observes the traffic between Microsoft’s Active Directory servers and network entities such as users and devices in order to create an Organizational Security Graph (OSG) that models relationships between the different entities. The Organizational Security Graph depicts anomalous behavior that can be used to identify potential or actual security breaches. The OSG constructs an attack timeline and profiles of entities that enable speedy categorizations of potential security breaches such that security professionals can take action against the incident in question with the appropriate degree of speed and urgency. Aorato constructed its OSG graph database using a NoSQL database platform and proprietary code used to map relationships between different entities in the Active Directory ecosystem. In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, CEO Idan Plotnik noted that the company began coding OSG using Neo4j but chose to transition to a proprietary, custom developed platform in order to more effectively accommodate the specificities of the relationships between and amongst Active Directory entities.

Prior to Aorato, Idan was CEO of a security consulting firm that specialized in security solutions for Microsoft products and technologies. Aorato recently finalized a second round of funding of over $8M that brings the total capital raised by the company to $10M. Investors include Accel Partners, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Glilot Capital Partners and entrepreneurs Mickey Boodaei and Rakesh Loonkar. The Aorato team has significant experience working for the Cybersecurity department within the Israeli Defense Forces and plans to maintain R&D in Israel while locating sales and marketing and other company functions in the U.S., in NYC. The cybersecurity space should expect to hear more about Aorato in the upcoming months, particularly as it signs up more enterprise customers and reveals further details about the analytics enabled by its proprietary, Big Data graph database platform.

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Bromium Finalizes $40M In Series C Funding For Hardware-Based IT Security Solution

Cybersecurity vendor Bromium recently announced the finalization of $40M in Series C funding in a round lef by Meritech Capital Partners with additional participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Highland Capital Partners and Intel Capital. Bromium delivers a hardware-based solution for protecting IT infrastructures against malware and other security threats by way of its proprietary Bromium Microvisor technology, which spins up micro-virtual machines (micro-VMs) every time an application is used. Bromium’s premise is that by limiting the geography of malware to discrete micro-VMs, they can be more easily controlled and ameliorated. Bromium’s vSentry solution takes advantage of Intel CPU functionality related to virtualization to isolate the hardware required for internet access or downloading files. Meanwhile, LAVA provides customers with visualization capabilities to understand and mitigate threats to cybersecurity. Customers manage the Bromium solution by way of the Bromium Management Server (BMS), which controls both vSentry deployment as well as the aggregation and analysis of LAVA events. The Series C capital raise brings the total capital raised by Bromium to $75.7M, according to TechCrunch. Bromium’s current roster of customers includes NYSE, Blackrock and ADP.