The Cybereason Mindset: A military/intelligence approach to fighting today’s cyberattacks

There is a ferocious war going on right now that we are not fully aware of. We may not be using infantry, tanks, jets or missiles, but the consequences are at the scale and magnitude of World War II and the Cold War.

As “software eats the world,” the world has become much more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Advances in cyber warfare have allowed relatively small teams of dedicated, well-funded professionals to inflict damage on corporations, infrastructure and state-level institutions like never before.

When we wrote about War-time/Peace-time cyber security, we didn’t realize how close we were to describing what was happening in real-time, as Russian hackers (reportedly) quietly, but effectively, disrupted the democratic process of the presidential elections in the U.S. Every corporation and government office — large or small — is in this war, like it or not. And that means you.

Technology itself is not enough to fight this war. We need to adopt the military and intelligence community mindset of intelligence gathering, deception, infiltration, persistence and countermeasures for our institutions and corporations to survive this new type of attack.

When we first met the founders of Cybereason four years ago, we were beyond impressed by their technology. But we were much more interested in their mindset, born out of more than a decade of offensive and defensive cybersecurity warfare, and real-world experiences of battling nation state-sponsored hackers.

Specific technical approaches to hacking will come, go and continually evolve, and what works well today may be obsolete tomorrow. Companies and institutions must partner with experts like Cybereason, who possess the right mindset to address the existential threats posed to them today.

Historically, corporate spend on digital security has been a subset of IT budgets. As the new reality of cyber warfare sets in, security budgets need to increase tenfold, in some cases a hundred-fold, if they hope to protect against catastrophic outcomes.

Today, Cybereason raised an additional $100M to help us rise to the challenge. They will accelerate the deployment of their award-winning technology into thousands of corporations worldwide, which will be a huge step forward in endpoint protection. To say we believe in this company is an understatement. With what they have built, and CEO and Co-Founder Lior Div at the helm, they are the uncontested leader in the fight against cybercrime.

— Izhar Armony