E8 Security, a provider of behavioral intelligence tools for detecting cyber threats, today announced that it has raised $12 million in a Series B funding round.
Strategic Cyber Ventures led the round, bringing the total amount raised by the company to date to $21.8 million.
Redwood City, Calif.-based E8 offers a user and entity based analytics (UEBA) platform that can measure an organization’s cyber risk and identify early warning signs when sensitive resources are being targeted by attackers.
By using Big Data behavioral analytics, E8 says it can help security teams detect, hunt, and respond to threats by recognizing what is normal in their network so they can respond to what is not.
Headed by former Trend Micro Chief Cybersecurity Officer Tom Kellermann, Strategic Cyber Ventures is an investment fund formed early this year to focus on investing in innovative cybersecurity startups.
“Intrusion suppression requires a decrease in dwell time,” Kellermann told SecurityWeek. “The solution lies in entity fusion and anomalous behavior detection.”
According to FireEye’s most recent M-Trends report, the average dwell time (the time it takes to detect a security breach) stood at 146 days in 2015, down from 205 days in 2014—a trend that shows positive improvement since measuring 416 days back in 2012.
E8 explains that its platform leverages lateral movement modeling of user and endpoint activities, along with network traffic patterns originating from within an organization’s perimeter to track threat activity.
“Its self-learning, multi-dimensional behavioral analytics examines all user, endpoint and network activities, and provides a comprehensive view of unknown threat indicators within the organization to eliminate the siloed view of an organization’s security posture,” the company says.
Ann Barron-Dicamillo, CTO at Strategic Cyber Ventures, further elaborates how E8’s platform works: “E8 detects activities that exceeds a magnitude higher or lower than what’s ‘always done’. These behavior anomalies are tracked as ‘is it new? is it rare? is it outside the pattern?’ This continued tuning to machine learning creates bits of intelligence to help operators focus on what matters,” Barron-Dicamillo explained in a blog post.
In Kellermann’s opinion, the future of cybersecurity is intrusion suppression. “Dwell time must be reduced in real-time via the deployment of entity fusion and behavior analytics,” he said.
Previous investors March Capital Partners, Allegis Capital, and The Hive, also participated in the Series B round.
According to E8, the new funds will be used to expand its flagship security platform and fuel sales and marketing efforts.
