Cybersecurity firm XM Cyber Inc., owned since November 2021 by Schwarz Group, today revealed that it has acquired attack interception cybersecurity firm Confluera Inc. for an undisclosed price.

Founded in 2018, Confluera’s platform offers real-time attack interception and defense by deterministically identifying complex, multistage attacks. The platform tracks all activities within an enterprise’s infrastructure, malicious or benign, to build a real-time map as its starting point, which is then used to identify sequences that reflect malicious intent.

With the acquisition, XM Cyber now offers a comprehensive Cloud Native Application Protection Platform solution with unique attack path modeling to prioritize and assess real risk to the critical assets in a cloud environment. The acquisition expands XM Cyber’s Continuous Exposure Management platform to provide all aspects of cloud security, according to the company. That includes identifying and fixing risk regarding cloud identities, identifying vulnerabilities, detecting and responding to cyberattacks in real time, and best-practice and compliance management.

“We work so well together because we’re both looking at the environment through attack path modeling,” Boaz Gorodissky, co-founder and chief technology officer at XM Cyber, said ahead of the announcement. “For example, XM Cyber shows our customers how an attacker could take advantage of a cloud secret found in the on-prem environment, move into the cloud, escalate privileges of an EC2, and compromise S3 buckets with sensitive information through a chain of events. Now with Confluera, we will detect if this attack path is actually happening in real time, alert our customers and help them stop the attack before it reaches the S3 buckets.”

The XM Cyber solution enables organizations to see their on-premises data centers and cloud environments as an attacker would, so they can identify weaknesses that can potentially be exploited on attack paths to critical assets. With the addition of Confluera, XM Cyber can continuously monitor their cloud environments in real time to see if they are actually being exploited and effectively block the attacker’s progress before any damage is caused.

“Integrating Confluera into our offering just made so much sense,” said Noam Erez, co-founder and chief executive officer of XM Cyber. “We compared their detection capabilities on workloads with a prominent CWPP solution and were able to detect several attacks that the other CWPP solutions did not. And perhaps just as significantly, it did not create unnecessary noise for the security teams.”

Coming into its acquisition, Confluera had raised $29 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase, including a round of $9 million in July 2019. Investors included Icon Ventures L.P., Lightspeed Venture Partners L.P. and former Microsoft Corp. Chairman John W. Thompson.

Thompson, along with co-founder Abhijit Ghosh, spoke with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in 2019 about how Confluera differs from other players in the cybersecurity market:

Image: Confluera