Cybereason, a Boston, Mass.-based EDR/EPP security firm heavily invested in machine learning and AI-based solutions, has raised a further $200 million in a Series E funding round to support its product innovation and strengthen its global reach through its partner program.
Between 100 and 200 additional staff (the firm currently employs around 500 people) will be hired, the company says.
The funding is described as a series of investments and commitments by SoftBank Group Corp. and its affiliates. It brings the total funding raised by Cybereason to approximately $400 million since it was founded in 2012 by Lior Div, Yonatan Amit and Yossi Naar. The firm previously raised $100 million from Softbank is a Series D round in June 2017. Since that time, it has increased its customer base by more than 300%, and now protects more than 6 million endpoints.
Softbank is more than just a financier for Cybereason. It is a major and important sales partner, with, Lior Div, co-founder and CEO of Cybereason told SecurityWeek, “a formidable sales force and enterprise customer base in Japan, and a global reach.” Cybereason is Softbank’s primary endpoint protection offering.
The firm will also use the new funding to build the worldís ‘first full stack offering for truly Autonomous Security’. “Autonomous security will democratize and transform the cybersecurity profession. Creating such automation in security requires fusion of multiple data sources, business context, machine learning and big data analytics,” said Yonatan Striem-Amit, CTO and co-founder.
Exactly what this ‘autonomous security’ will entail is not specified. However, since Cybereason is fundamentally about endpoint protection, it will likely entail the product itself automatically isolating or quarantining infected endpoints wherever an infection is confirmed. It does not specify whether this will include disinfection of the malware and/or any malicious attachment via the cloud-based endpoint protection platform, but it will require a high degree of accuracy from Cybereason’s AI-based real time analysis of endpoint logs.
In June 2019, Cybereason’s Nocturnus group of researchers detected a global cyber campaign against telecommunications providers. “What we’re talking about,” Amit Serper, head of security research at Nocturnus, told SecurityWeek, “is a global campaign against mobile telecoms companies. The attackers are hacking into the service providers, completely controlling the network, and exfiltrating an obscene amount of data out of them. We’re talking about gigabytes of data.” He believes that the hackers are most likely the Chinese state affiliated APT10 group.
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