Attack interception Cybersecurity firm Confluera Inc. announced today that it has raised $9 million in new funding to accelerate its growth and to bring its main cybersecurity product to market.

The Series A round was led by Lightspeed and included Microsoft Corp. Chairman John W. Thompson; Frank Slootman, former chief executive officer of ServiceNow Inc; and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks Inc.

Offering real-time attack interception and defense using a platform to deterministically identify and stop ongoing complex, multistage attacks, Confluera’s platform tracks all activities within an enterprise’s infrastructure, malicious or benign, to build a real-time map as its starting point.

With that data, the platform uses security signals from all sources to identify sequences that reflect malicious intent. Surgical responses are then deployed automatically across affected entities to stop attacks from progressing.

Speaking exclusively to John Furrier on SiliconANGLE’s video studio theCUBE, Thompson and co-founder and CEO Abhijit Ghosh discussed the company’s plans and how it differs from existing players.

“What I believe the company is really trying to accomplish is a shift from real-time detection to real-time prevention and what we tend to do in the security space is segment and isolate problem after problem after problem — and therefore to aggregate a view of what’s going on in the enterprise across all of those stacks is never easy,” Thompson said. “It’s OK if you want to do post-event incident response, but if you want to do real-time detection and prevention … that’s got to have a layer that is much different than what has evolved in the security space over the last five or 10 years.”

Discussing broader security issues, Ghosh explained that “today the attack surface is really large [so] there are many ways of getting in, but once they get in, it’s really about that progression … from that initial foothold to the final target.”

Ghosh went on to explain further, “It’s the process of privilege escalations, lateral movement creating more ingress points to get in so when that progression happens, the manifestation is separated in time. It appears on different machines and there is nothing deterministic out there to pull put all of that together.”

Here’s the full interview:

Photo: SiliconANGLE