Cyberpion raises $8.25M to boost sales and marketing efforts

Cyberpion announced it has emerged from stealth after closing an $8.25 million seed funding round co-led by Team8 Capital and Hyperwise Ventures.

The company’s groundbreaking platform enables security teams to identify and neutralize the rising threats stemming from vulnerabilities within online assets throughout an enterprise’s far-reaching, connected ecosystem.

Cyberpion will use the new capital to boost its sales and marketing efforts, while expanding and accelerating product development of its Ecosystem Security platform.

Enterprises are increasingly leveraging a myriad of technology partners and third party online solutions to enrich their market presence, improve operations, and best serve customers.

Each of these partners make countless more connections, creating an ever-expanding ecosystem of predominantly unmonitored and unmanaged resources that are vulnerable targets for attackers to take over and exploit.

Relevant attacks can take the form of public key (PKI) breaches, malicious code or resource injection (Magecart-style attacks), DNS hijacks and abuse of misconfigured cloud infrastructures, with the intent to take over the assets of connected organizations and steal data.

This ecosystem of seemingly legitimate connections and trusted resources creates a continually growing attack surface that extends far beyond the security perimeter, which is uniquely appealing to hackers, and extremely complicated for enterprises to monitor and secure.

Cyberpion uniquely solves the problem of defending ecosystem vulnerabilities and neutralizing threats from attackers along three key parameters:

• Discovering the extensive inventory of known and unknown assets throughout the enterprise’s far-reaching ecosystem, including directly and indirectly connected resources
• Continuously performing a security assessment for a uniquely extensive set of vulnerabilities on these assets and connections before attackers can exploit them
• Providing timely alerts with actionable directions and automated proactive protection where possible to neutralize vulnerabilities

The Cyberpion platform is a SaaS solution with a distributed architecture, and works immediately without any installation, configurations or modifications.

“Following rapid growth in both research and development as well as winning new customers that include Fortune 500 companies, we are excited to emerge from stealth and champion the rising ecosystem security sector,” said Cyberpion founder and CEO Dr. Nethanel Gelernter.

“We appreciate Team8 Capital and Hyperwise Ventures’ recognition that cybersecurity needs to extend well beyond the enterprise’s own assets and perimeter, leveraging a more agile and proactive approach that is critical to protecting against far-reaching ecosystem attacks. Cyberpion looks forward to a close partnership with these two leading venture firms.”

Ecosystem security, a timely response to today’s cybersecurity threats

In today’s evolving cyber landscape, enterprises require new security solutions that extend beyond the traditional perimeter-centric approaches, like firewalls and antivirus software, which don’t address ecosystem attacks.

Recently, the Magecart hacking group has exploited online shopping cart systems to steal card payment data from eight US city websites, Forbes, TicketMaster, British Airways and thousands of e-commerce sites by compromising third party payment software.

In 2019, Magecart-style attacks were estimated to have cost businesses over $1 billion. In 2020, Cyberpion’s research team continues to see an increase in the abuse of online infrastructures, including a campaign that has hit hundreds of enterprises and governments.

In each of these cases, hackers abused web and DNS connections to misconfigured cloud infrastructures to gain a foothold inside the organization. With an ecosystem security solution, risky connections and vulnerable assets can be monitored, and tracked with threats neutralized to help minimize attacks via this online infrastructure.

Former Global Head of Cloud Security at Check Point, Senior Director at Aqua Security and Director of Enterprise Strategy at Microsoft, Ran Nahmias co-founded Cyberpion and is CBO.

Nahmias commented, “Enterprise security risks are no longer constrained to the gates of the organization’s firewall. The threats are analogous to infections caused by the Covid-19 virus.

“While detecting the virus in your immediate circle of contacts is helpful, the detected level of exposure exponentially grows as you start factoring in people in your second, third and fourth circles of contact.

“Cyberpion works by detecting threats from all connected third party online solutions, their connections, and the connections of their connections, to systematically identify vulnerabilities and neutralize previously undetectable threats within the vast, highly dynamic online ecosystem.”

“Team8 Capital is excited to co-lead the seed funding of Cyberpion and partner with its exceptional leadership team on an ambitious mission to mitigate security vulnerabilities stemming from enterprise adoption of third party technologies,” said Sarit Firon, Managing Partner of Team8 Capital.

“For enterprises, Cyberpion offers a unique solution that takes into account the new and pervasive reality of connected online supply chains, giving CISOs access to a new paradigm of security with a dynamic and proactive approach.”

“Attacks on external digital assets of enterprises are becoming a prominent vector for sophisticated cyber criminals, ” said Hyperwise Ventures’ Managing Partner Nathan Shuchami.

“In the face of hackers finding vulnerabilities in new and wider attack surfaces, Cyberpion offers unparalleled detection and protection capabilities, providing comprehensive security across the organization’s entire online ecosystem. Hyperwise Ventures is thrilled to co-lead the seed funding round in Cyberpion.”