Cybersecurity solutions company Apollo Information Systems Corp. today announced the public debut of iCOUNTER, a new cyber risk intelligence company emerging from seven years in stealth operations with $30 million in funding to help customers counter highly targeted attacks.

The new company assists with the growing threat of artificial intelligence-enabled attackers who are rapidly shifting their focus and targeting specific companies. They’re leveraging AI capabilities to reduce dramatically the time and cost of conducting reconnaissance to profile a target.

Though officially launching only today, iCOUNTER has provided customers across the U.S. with actionable intelligence to defend against cyberthreats from nation-states, ransom groups and other malicious actors, preventing collective losses worth millions of dollars since 2020.

ICOUNTER is led by security pioneer John Watters (pictured), who has more than two decades of experience in building cybersecurity businesses.

Watters is best known for founding and leading several companies in the cyber intelligence space, including iSIGHT Partners Inc. and iDEFENSE Inc. At iDEFENSE, he helped pioneer the zero-day vulnerability discovery industry, a milestone chronicled in Nicole Perlroth’s “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends.”

The company was sold to Verisign Inc. in 2005. Watters later founded iSIGHT Partners, which became a leading threat intelligence firm before being acquired by FireEye Inc. It was integrated into Mandiant Inc., where he served as president and chief operating officer during its eventual sale to Google LLC.

Following his retirement from Mandiant in 2022, Watters joined SYN Ventures as a venture partner and served on the boards of several cybersecurity companies, including Apollo, Batuta Inc., Mitiga Inc. and Oleria Inc.

With the launch of iCOUNTER, Watters returns to the front lines to address what he describes as the most significant shift in cybersecurity since the early 2000s: the adoption of AI by adversaries to launch highly customized, targeted attacks.

“My work helping pioneer the cyber intelligence industry was done as my belief that what we built at iSIGHT/Mandiant/Google could never be replicated,” said Watters. “After retiring, I continued to invest in cybersecurity companies – one being Apollo.

“Then, the world changed almost overnight as industry embraced AI like never before and we set out on creating efficiency in every walk of life, from search to coding to financial analysis,” Watters added. “Adversaries always embrace innovation at a pace well in advance of defenders and the AI surge is no different. The world has seen just the tip of the iceberg in terms of adversary innovation through their use of AI for impersonation, advanced phishing spears, etc. What the world has not seen is what we have seen at Apollo for the past five years – the rapid acceleration of AI-enabled adversaries to select targets, conduct reconnaissance to define security gaps and build highly customized attack methods to exploit those security gaps.”

The $30 million in Series A funding for iCOUNTER came from SYN Ventures.

Photo: Batuta