Cyberpion: How to Connect your enterprise online
Companies around the world have had to re-engineer their efforts in order to become as digitally advanced as possible. From coffee breaks migrating to Microsoft Teams and meetings being held on Zoom, to increasing amounts of data being stored in cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, the digital ecosystem has never been more connected.
These corporate integrations have led to more sustainable and agile workflows, but they can also have a negative impact. What happens when companies run into cybersecurity breaches? The reality is that the average cost of a data breach can be about $3.86 million. According to a study published by Verizon in 2020, 45% of breaches featured hacking, 17% involved malware and 22% phishing.
It is these types of risks that motivated entrepreneur Dr. Nethanel Gelernter to study and analyze the first steps that hackers take before breaching an organization. What he found was that they were no longer targeting or conducting head-on attacks against the traditional security perimeter. As he points out: “The mindset of the hacker is to locate the easiest and most vulnerable element and leverage that to begin their attack – and this element comes in the form of the third parties to which an enterprise is connected.” And in order to protect organizations from this type of attack, Gelernter co-founded Cyberpion alongside fellow cybersecurity experts Ori Engelberg and Ran Nahmias.
Allowing organizations to connect with confidence
Cyberpion, which is based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, has developed a proactive solution that enables security teams to pre-emptively mitigate any vulnerabilities in a company that could be exploited by a digital threat. Nahmias, Cyberpion’s co-founder and Chief Business Officer, says that “in the era of COVID-19, the transition to conducting business digitally or with zero-touch has only accelerated and expanded the need for organizations to implement third-party solutions.” As more companies leverage these third-party vendor solutions to enrich their online market presence, improve operations and serve customers, they are becoming more susceptible to cyber threats every day.
Companies should bear in mind that all of the partners they are connecting to have their own IT infrastructure, which is in turn connected to even more complex systems: this is where hackers take advantage. Rather than attacking head-on, hackers threaten an enterprise’s secure data by exploiting the vulnerabilities from these third-party vendors.
What role does Cyberpion play in protecting these enterprises? The startup’s innovative Ecosystem Security Platform™ effectively identifies and neutralizes threats to a company's digital ecosystem before hackers can find and exploit them. “We discover and catalog the entire inventory of assets throughout the third-party IT ecosystem,” says Nahmias, adding that “for most organizations, having no understanding of the true size and scope of their ecosystem has left them blind and unprepared to defend this attack.”
As Cyberpion’s platform begins to understand a company’s infrastructure, it continuously leverages its adaptive algorithm to perform security assessments on each and every asset within the ecosystem. Once analyzed, a prioritized list of action items is provided to the security team through a web portal, API notification system or integrations with other systems in the organization so that critical threats are dealt with immediately. These capabilities empower companies to move forward with their daily processes with confidence and a sense of security.
Mitigating future risks alongside Enel
Not only has Cyberpion been a catalyst for more secure digital organizations, it has also managed to obtain $8.25 million in seed round funding. At Enel, we are proud to be a part of this startup’s journey to success and work with it in order to identify the many potential threats in the digital ecosystem. “As a startup, it can be difficult to get the attention of cybersecurity heads of Fortune 100 companies,” says Nahmias, who adds: “This is where Enel has been instrumental in our early success – by making introductions to these stakeholders and providing validation for our solution.”
Ultimately, the startup is defying the status quo and providing a sense of security to organizations around the world. When asked about how innovation can have a global impact, Nahmias answered: “By seeing and acting on what is possible or what could be, people, teams, businesses, governments and countries are able to create a future that can be free of the negative outcomes that we’ve seen in the past”. By working together, we are not only creating a safer digital world, but we are also allowing more companies to collaborate and optimize their entire workflows.