Dragos Raises $1.2 Million to Counter ICS Cyber Threats

Dragos, a startup focused on protecting industrial control systems (ICS) from cyber threats, has raised $1.2 million from startup studio DataTribe.

Founded by a small group of former NSA intelligence officers with experience in ICS security, Dragos offers a network asset discovery and visualization tool called CyberLens. The tool was developed specifically for control systems environments, which often require deep packet inspection through passive network scanning or data collection.

However, CyberLens will not be the primary focus of the company as it moves forward, the company’s chief executive says.

Robert M. Lee, co-founder and CEO of Dragos, said that the company will be putting the capital to use to build a new Threat Operations Center (TOC) and expand into other areas.

Co-founders Jon Lavender and Justin Cavinee first teamed up with Lee while working in the U.S. Intelligence Community where they established a mission focused on identifying nation-states carrying out attacks and cyber espionage against critical infrastructure.

“We built a TOC while in the Intel community to identify nation states targeting critical infrastructure and it was very successful, so we are doing the same thing while developing Intel, analytics and technologies to help automate analyst efforts so that small teams can scale to protect more infrastructure,” Lee told SecurityWeek.

“We will have a threat hunting team that also does incident response, malware analysis, and threat intelligence,” he said.

The company is also developing a data pipeline product that is easily managed and configured that allows customers to collect host, network and relevant ICS data that can be accessed via a single, searchable interface for events and abnormalities. “We’re giving them, in essence, a lightweight industrial SIEM,” Lee said.

“There is a lack of visibility and insight into the cyber threats targeting infrastructure networks,” Lee said in a statement. “We aim to hunt down these threats while developing solutions to return value to infrastructure operators and owners.”

Lee says the company’s first key hires will be announced in the weeks and months ahead.