Venture-backed cybersecurity startup Cyware Labs Inc. today introduced CTIX Lite, a cloud service that it says will make it more practical for midmarket companies to make use of threat intelligence feeds in their security operations.

Threat intelligence feeds are services that provide organizations with information on online risks such as malicious website domains being used to spread malware and emerging hacking campaigns. This information can be a valuable resource for security teams. Some threat intelligence feeds are paid offerings, while others are available at no charge.

But although using threat intelligence can be completely free in theory, it’s often inaccessible for smaller organizations in practice because the information is technically complex to employ. Most security products that offer capabilities to simplify the task, Cyware says, are aimed at enterprises with big cybersecurity budgets, which the startup argues creates a “large market gap.” Its newly announced CTIX Lite service promises to make threat intelligence accessible for midmarket companies with smaller security teams and put them on equal footing with their larger peers.

CTIX Lite provides a dashboard through which security teams can gather information on online threats. The service can aggregate data both from traditional threat intelligence feeds and any other sources that a company may rely upon, such as industry reports and blog posts published by cybersecurity software providers. In the case of unstructured information such as blog posts, CTIX Lite automatically converts the files into the STIX format, a popular industry data standard for sharing threat intelligence.

CTIX Lite also helps make the information it collects actionable. Automated algorithms remove duplicate entries and assign a confidence score to every item to help administrators identify which alerts they should prioritize. After it’s processed, the incoming threat data is visualized in a dashboard that shows high-level metrics such as the number of suspicious activity indicators detected.

Security teams typically make use of more than one software tool as part of their work. To make it easier for customers to add CTIX Lite into their workflows, Cyware has included the ability to export data from its service to firewalls, SIEM or security information and event management systems and other security products. 

“Bad actors don’t discriminate and smaller companies equally need the capability to be able to automatically ingest, enrich, analyze, and take action upon threat intelligence,” said Cyware Chief Technology Officer Akshat Jain. “With the launch of CTIX Lite, we are making actionable intelligence more accessible, achievable, and affordable for a much broader pool of security teams and at one-fifth of the cost of traditional threat intel platforms.”

The introduction of CTIX Lite comes about three months after Cyware closed a $10 million funding round led by Prelude Fund and Tanium. 

Photo: Cyware