Cyberattack recovery startup Salvador Technologies Ltd. said today it has secured $6 million in funding to help it achieve its goal of protecting industrial organizations and their most critical information technology infrastructure.

Today’s round was led by Pico Venture Partners and saw participation from existing investors Pitango VC and Sarona Partners.

The Israeli startup says it has built a cyberattack recovery platform that’s powered by a patented security failover technology to prevent any downtime in the event that its customers fall victim to so-called ransomware attacks, which use malware to lock up data and demand a “fee” is paid for the information to be recovered. With Salvador’s platform, they can ensure ongoing continuity with their operational technology and industrial control systems.

It’s an important capability because the average downtime period following a cyberattack lasts for three weeks, resulting in direct and indirect damage. Using Salvador’s failover technology, customers can bypass their standard recovery protocols. In this way, critical infrastructure operators and industrial organizations can recover their systems, servers and workstations from any problems within just 30 seconds, the startup says.

The startup was founded in 2020 by childhood friends Alex Yevtushenko and Oleg Vusiker, who serve as its chief executive and chief technology officer, respectively.

Yevtushenko said the frequency of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure systems is increasing as cybercriminals adopt artificial intelligence systems to aid in bypassing the security measures they implement. Because of this, “the need for an effective recovery solution is critical,” he said.

Disaster recovery systems are commonplace in the cybersecurity industry, but Salvador says existing solutions are more geared toward recovering data as a result of damage from fire or water, or information lost through theft, rather than ransomware attacks. What’s more, many disaster recovery systems are themselves vulnerable malware that copies itself to data backups to prevent the victim from simply restoring to an earlier point in time.

Salvador explains how it mitigates this threat by ensuring its backups are stored on a dedicated Cyber Recovery Unit, which is an air-gapped server it supplies to customers. The CRU creates a full duplicate of the industry control system, including its operating system, data files, drivers and unique user configurations. Each time a backup is performed, Salvador employs monitoring technologies to ensure the data is not compromised by malware. To safeguard critical assets stored in private cloud networks, Salvador offers an alternative piece of hardware known as a Network Recovery Station, which can back up much larger volumes of data.

The company reckons it can even protect against the most advanced persistent threats, known as APT attacks. These kinds of attacks are usually carried out by state-sponsored actors and are carefully planned, designed to evade the most advanced security measures and fly under the radar. Attackers use multiple techniques to gain access and maintain a long-term presence inside the system, with the ultimate goal being to locate and steal strategic or sensitive data.

To counter such threats, Salvador creates three copies of customer’s data, one of which can never be accessed prior to recovery to avoid APT infection. The other two copies are secured using Salvador’s patented offline protection algorithms. Access to the data in these two copies is time-limited and only allowed using Salvador’s dedicated software, with the disks undetectable by the underlying operating system.

Salvador says the reliability of its platform has enabled it to rapidly grow its customer base, which includes a number of multi-national manufacturing corporations in the chemical, food, automotive and aerospace industries, as well as critical infrastructure providers such as water and energy provides, healthcare centers and national maritime ports.

Pico Ventures General Partner Tal Yatsiv said the startup is solving a big problem in an underserved operational technology market. “The company’s innovative solution acts as an insurance policy for organizations, eliminating risk by ensuring an immediate full recovery following an attack or a system malfunction,” he said.

Image: Salvador Technologies