Former cyber-intelligence sleuths for Israel now work to uncover malicious hackers

by Dramelin 1:30 AM 0 comments

In an industry where one of the biggest problems companies face is a shortage of talent, having access to an abundance of skilled individuals is an advantage to Israeli cybersecurity startups.
"The military has become one of the thresholds of innovation and technology in the last couple of decades because of this phenomenon," said Zafrir.
He explained that Team8`s philosophy in building startups from the ground up is guided by the need to solve big problems using the resources they have at their disposal.
Every year, the company starts by choosing an area of cybersecurity they want a company to address: from cloud to mobile or enterprise, after having conversations with many industry stakeholders as possible.
Following that, Team8`s research team spends a few months to identify the exact problem.
If the problem is big and sophisticated enough, the project moves onto the next, ideation, stage, where resources are examined to identify how they can create a more efficient solution.
Finally, the project goes to the validation stage before a company is set up.
"We go through this process once a year and it usually takes about 12 months, and at the end of that period, if we think we got all the ingredients to attack the problem … we go and put the first investment in each of our companies," said Zafrir.
"And then, it goes into the execution phase and becomes part of our portfolio.
" One of the companies that came out of Team8 was illusive networks, which uses deception technology to mislead hackers who have breached a network.
"The domain that we chose for illusive was that for targeted attacks," Ofer Israeli, CEO and founder of illusive networks, told CNBC.
"I`m referring to those groups that will target a very specific organization in order to perform very specific damage, whether it`s stealing data, disrupting data or commodifying data.
And they`re going to invest heavy resources in order to do so.
" Illusive`s technology will create false versions of a company`s network to lure the hacker.
Once the hacker accesses this alternate version, security teams are immediately alerted and the attacker`s connection is slowed down but kept alive.
That allows a forensic team to investigate what the attacker is doing from the compromised machine, essentially trapping the hacker within the false version of the network.
Illusive is backed by companies like Microsoft Ventures, Cisco and Team8 among others, and has raised over $30 million since its founding in 2014.