The 10 Coolest Security Startups Of 2013

Security Industry Startups Proliferate In 2013

The top security industry startups of 2013 have created new technologies that address a broad range of complex issues impacting data security, and privacy and system resiliency to attacks. CRN named 10 startups in the first half of 2013 that developed new ways to encrypt data and prevent attackers from gaining access to systems.

This list brings together 10 additional startups that are providing ways to efficiently manage the security of cloud-based systems, leverage threat intelligence data to bolster the protection from existing security appliances, and monitor network behavior to detect suspicious activity before it becomes a serious security incident.

JumpCloud

Co-founder, CEO: Rajat Bhargava

Boulder, Colo.-based JumpCloud automates the maintenance, monitoring and the security of cloud-based servers. The company launched this year at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition in San Francisco. Co-founder Rajat Bhargava, formerly CEO of network access control and managed security services firm StillSecure, told CRN that JumpCloud's turnkey software supports DevOps and IT pros in server management and security. Firms that embrace the idea of DevOps can boost the efficiency of creating software and services by bridging the development team and operations processes.

The SaaS-based software, which can be sold as an add-on, provides activity-monitoring, maintains patch management cycles and checks for configuration weaknesses. It manages SSH keys and implements multifactor authentication to automate the process of account creation and management. It's free for three servers; premium plans start at $10 per server per month.

Adallom

CEO: Assaf Rappaport

Israeli-based startup Adallom was founded in 2011, but formally unveiled its cloud auditing service this week, which monitors users of SaaS applications to identify suspicious behavior and prevent attempts to manipulate or steal data. The service creates a profile of every user and supports popular SaaS-based applications, such as Box and Salesforce.com.

The firm has recently detected an attack on users of a popular SaaS provider. It is on the same playing field as SkyHigh Networks, which also uses a reverse-proxy approach to provide authentication, encryption and policy enforcement.

The service alerts businesses to high-risk incidents, tracks users and has reporting capabilities. It documents a user's login, device, location and activity. Priced on a per-user basis, Adallom starts at $5 per user, with volume pricing available for private node deployments.

Norse

CEO: Sam Glines

Industry analysts monitoring the security market say threat intelligence services have gained a lot of interest over the last 12 months. Norse, based in Silicon Valley, is one of the latest startups that has built a platform designed to provide actionable threat intelligence. The firm recently announced that it obtained $10 million in Series A funding from Oak Investment Partners to expand engineering, product development, and sales and marketing. The company makes IPViking, an IP traffic monitoring tool that takes data from a global network of sensors to create a blacklist of high-risk IPs. In addition to tracking live attacks, it can identify malware, enabling IT teams to add blacklists to security appliances for additional protection. The company's chief technology officer, Tommy Stiansen, has roots in the intelligence community, where he worked on various projects, including architecting platforms used in cyberwarfare scenarios. IPViking is being aimed at enterprises, managed security providers, public and private cloud providers, and ISPs.

Mojave Networks

CEO: Garrett Larsson

Mojave Networks focuses on mobile security at the network level, providing a cloud-based platform that monitors device and mobile application usage to detect threats. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company collects the networks the device connects to, the cloud services and mobile applications being used, and how it connects to the corporate network. The usage data is shared with IT teams who can create enforceable policies. The company's service also analyzes Android and iOS applications used by popular mobile services, such as Box, Evernote, Google Drive and Dropbox, and creates a risk profile, enabling administrators to add a whitelist, based on the names of apps that use them. Garrett Larsson, co-founder and CEO of Mojave, told CRN that the service can be set up in minutes. It provides Web filtering and data loss prevention capabilities, such as the ability for the enterprise to detect and block a device sending out credit card or Social Security numbers in clear text. Enterprise clients pay a monthly fee based on the number of devices enrolled.

AlephCloud

CEO: Jieming Zhu

AlephCloud has developed technology that provides security and privacy policy enforcement for sharing data using public cloud services. The company's cloud-based Content Canopy platform supports Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and other popular services. It encrypts sensitive data and supports compliance enforcement by auditing the use of the services.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm assures content owners that neither the cloud provider nor AlephCloud can view the data. The data is encrypted before it is uploaded to the cloud service, helping businesses gain control over the information and prove chain of custody. Users can create a group of trusted individuals to securely share documents.

The service supports Windows, Mac OS, iOS and support for Android devices is coming soon, according to the company. Businesses pay a monthly fee for licensed users.

PrivateCore

CEO: Oded Horovitz

PrivateCore provides full memory encryption that secures applications and data on standard x86 servers. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said its platform, called PrivateCore vCage, virtualizes physical security and protects data-in-use. It uses virtualization inside the CPU to encrypt data in memory. The company's software, PrivateCore vCage, can securely run any application in outsourced, hosted or cloud environments. The company said it can help prevent memory attacks for organizations that are using cloud infrastructure, encrypting data without requiring application or hardware modifications. It also helps support encryption at a branch office. The firm is currently testing the technology with enterprises and Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers. It received $2.4 million in venture capital from Foundation Capital.

BitSight Technologies

CEO: Shaun McConnon

BitSight Technologies is using threat intelligence to provide its users with a risk rating metrics service on the information security effectiveness of organizations. The company monitors externally visible network behavior to continuously keep track of an organization's security state. The startup secured $24 million in Series A funding in June.

Users of the service provide a list of partners for monitoring. The security effectiveness ratings range from 250 to 900 and are similar to consumer credit scores, said Stephen Boyer, co-founder and chief technology officer of BitSight. Boyer told CRN that the company combines threat intelligence feeds with sensors that monitor Internet traffic flowing to and from organizations. The service can detect suspicious behavior such as a denial-of-service attack or communication with a botnet command-and-control server. A dashboard provides ratings based on the severity and frequency of potential threats and their duration.

Silent Circle

CEO: Mike Janke

Despite shuttering its encrypted email service this year because it could not guarantee that it wouldn't be forced to turn over customer data when prompted by government requests, Silent Circle has pledged to continue to create ways to keep communications on mobile devices and video teleconferencing systems away from prying eyes. The Mountain View Calif.-based company has been aggressively addressing any fallout from the National Security Agency surveillance program revelations. It announced the formation of the Dark Mail Alliance in October, pledging to collaborate with other firms in developing end-to-end encryption technology to protect sensitive email messages. The goal is to create a new architecture and protocols that can defeat surveillance activities. Silent Circle was one of 10 security firms that debuted at RSA Conference 2013. With its iOS and Android apps, Silent Phone provides peer-to-peer encryption for VoIP calls and Silent Text encrypts text messages between users.

PacketSled Inc.

CEO: Matthew G. Harrigan

PacketSled is a security analytics platform that detects, contains and responds to threats. The technology can provides real-time alerting and can provide the full context of an incident and perform root cause analysis. Based in San Diego, PacketSled said its platform classifies more than 6,000 metadata attributes from within 1,300 protocols. It provides IT pros with a natural-language behavioral search tool to sort through the transactional data, and claims it can get results in less than five seconds. The goal is to find patterns of behavior that could signal a security incident, the company said.

A built-in rule builder can be tuned to alert about suspicious incidents based on behavioral pattern matching rules. Incorporated into the platform are visual analytics to interact with attack patterns within months of data. The company said its visual analytics helps investigators see anomalies and significant events that can't readily be identified algorithmically.

Bromium

CEO: Gaurav Banga

Cupertino, Calif.-based Bromium, which introduced its first product, vSentry in September 2012, continues to gain interest from businesses interested in taking a hardware-based approach to securing endpoints. The company calls its container technology, built on a Xen-based hypervisor, micro-virtualization. The approach isolates each Windows process to prevent malware from breaking out into the full system. Bromium recently raised $40M in Series C funding round. CTO and co-founder Simon Crosby founded and was CTO of XenSource prior to the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix. The firm is also partnering with other technology vendors with its platform. Bromium recently announced integration with ForeScout CounterACT to provide malware behavior data to incident responders.