UPDATED 08:03 EDT / OCTOBER 11 2016

NEWS

E8 Security bags $12 million to help find hidden threats using machine learning

Barely a week seems to go by nowadays without at least one startup raising funding to take on the industry’s established breach prevention providers. Today, the spotlight is on E8 Security Inc., an emerging threat analysis specalist that announced it has closed a $12 million round led by Strategic Cyber Ventures LLC.

The Washington, D.C.-based fund was launched earlier this year by veterans of Trend Micro Inc., Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and US-CERT, the federal agency responsible for combating online threats, to support promising security startups. E8 caught the executives’ attention thanks to its mathematical approach to improving network protection. The firm’s namesake breach detection system employs graph analysis, machine learning algorithms and other modern pattern recognition methods to find vulnerabilities that usually slip by traditional tools.

Once it finds an infected endpoint or a user who behaves suspiciously, the E8 Security Behavioral Intelligence Platform compares the anomaly against the rest of the network to see if there’s more than meets the eye. The startup says its algorithms can uncover everything from a threat’s propagation path to the number of devices it affects. And the company says the platform is also able to determine whether a set of seemingly isolated infections are in fact part of a coordinated attack campaign that requires closer attention from a company’s IT department.

From there, E8 displays the discovered threat in the order of their severity to help network protection professionals prioritize their work. The startup says that a built-in security analysis console provides the ability to drill down into every anomaly and look for patterns that its platform’s automated algorithms make have missed. The insights that are produced as part of the process can then be fed to a company’s primary breach prevention system to improve detection accuracu. Moreover, they’re also used by the E8 Security Behavioral Intelligence Platform itself to optimize how threats are prioritized based on users’ work patterns.

Today’s investment should enable the startup to broaden the software’s capabilities even further. E8 will need to work hard if it wants to stand out from the numerous other security vendors out there that are harnessing data science to combat hacking. Switzerland’s Nexthink SA, for instance, uses machine learning algorithms to detect malicious user activity in real-time. The firm closed a $40 million funding round of its own earlier this year to step up its competitive efforts.

Image via Pixabay

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU