Cloud-based enterprise security software provider Seculert announced today that it has closed a $5.35 million round of funding, led by Northwest Venture Partners and including existing investor YL Ventures. The Israeli startup intends to use the funds to expand into new U.S. offices based in San Francisco by the end of this year, and also to help it build out additional features for its SaaS cloud malware detection services.
Seculert offers companies a way to quickly and easily scan for malware on any connected platform their employees, both local and remote, officially supported by their IT department or not, might be using. They do this without requiring that any software be installed, via a cloud-based malware detection tool that scans IP addresses and domain names filed for monitoring by its clients. It’s a considerable time-saver for companies, since it requires that no software be installed, managed or have an updated local list of malware definitions on target devices. This new round of funding will help Seculert not only expand its reach, but also offer additional services that could eventually help business customers band together and present a more secure front against the biggest and baddest of malware security threats, Advanced Persistent Threats (APT).
APTs refer to intentional, long-term security challenges like the Stuxnet, for instance. Defending against this kind of threat depends heavily on gathering as much data as possible about them as quickly as possible in order to effectively defend against them. Seculert hopes to help better protect clients against APTs by effectively crowdsourcing data about these kinds of attacks via its customers, and this funding will help them achieve those goals.
“From a product perspective, we want to expand the product offering,” Seculert CEO and co-founder Dudi Matot told us in an interview. “We already allow our customers to not just rely on the information we provide them from live botnets, but we also offer them the opportunity to share with us internal information, and we want to extend that. So we’re already using big data to help inform our product, and we want to extend those analytics and let our customers find attack vectors that have affected one customer and could potentially affect them as well.” Adding the ability to collect data from clients to contribute to their existing information streams from live botnets will help Seculert complete the picture around APT attacks.
“We believe that to make the right the decision, with no false positives, you need to have very unique data, and a lot of data over time,” Matot said. “So by us intercepting information from live botnets with no false positives, and customers uploading internal information to our cloud, we have enough information flow over time to run our own analytics and provide customers with very advanced, pinpointed information about advanced attacks.”
While there are others out there doing similar things, Seculert’s main competition will be established malware protection measures popular with enterprise customers, like Symantec and AVG. Seculert’s lack of any kind of specific software requirements and complete device agnosticism will help it appeal, especially to increasingly polyglot organizations where Android, iOS, Windows, OS X and various other operating systems might all be in use at one time by employees, stringers and contractors scattered geographically.
