CloudSEK-Flagging Cyber Threats On Time

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With disruptive, new age cybersecurity technology, a Bengaluru-based company helps companies hold off threats to information security.

Most businesses ask: Are bad actors spying on our confidential data? Is the brand image at risk from fake sites? How can costly breaches in our infrastructure be prevented? What are hackers discussing about the company? While these and several similar concerns dog most Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), late, vague, and false-positive warnings magnify their concerns. Bengaluru-based CloudSEK, an information security risk management startup, has been offering cyber solutions to such issues.

Rahu Sasi, Founder & CTO and Sourabh Issar, CEO.

CloudSEK is an AI-driven unified risk management enterprise that focuses on intelligent security monitors and systems. It was founded by cyber maverick Rahul Sasi, who was earlier part of the pioneering cybersecurity firm iSight that was acquired by FireEye. He founded CloudSEK in 2015 by combining the emerging areas of AI, machine learning and automation. Sourabh Issar, the company’s current CEO, joined the company in 2018, bringing 18 years of experience with Fortune 500 companies in the USA. More recently, Anand Ramamoorthy, the former MD of Intel / McAfee, who headed the South Asia region for them, has joined the team at CloudSEK.

CloudSEK’s SaaS-based (software as a service), AI-driven unified risk management platform X-Vigil offers unique digital risk management capabilities to its clients. The outcome of four years of extensive research and development, X-Vigil has an outside-in discovery and posture assessment tool that enables it to track and assess all the external-facing assets of its customers and help identify insecure infrastructure. It basically helps in the assessment of its client’s security posture in real-time from the perspective of an attacker.

It also has an internet monitoring tool to detect cyber threats, data leaks, identity thefts and other similar threats by scouring 1000-plus sources across the surface web and dark web. Powered by CloudSEK’s proprietary AI-based machine learning platform, both the tools provide specific, actionable and timely intelligence and warnings to the clients. This enables clients to intervene and take remedial action, preventing costly breaches and losses.

Trust, which is the biggest asset of any firm leveraging the internet, is most at risk from actors with malicious intent, and CloudSEK helps reduce digital risk for clients. – Rahu Sasi, Founder & CTO and Sourabh Issar, CEO

The machine learning-based automation of the company’s platform allows it to process bulk data in a quick and cost-efficient manner. Users can pay on the basis of usage, which allows scalability without restrictive lock-ins. Moreover, the system doesn’t require any customer data and takes less than a couple of days to go live.

The platform’s algorithms can analyze 9 gigabytes of incremental data in seconds and give users specific, actionable and timely alerts. “Most cybersecurity organizations today are trying to address the issue of delayed warnings with teams of humans, either internal or sourced from service providers. CloudSEK has changed this by aggressively deploying AI and machine learning to completely revolutionize this space,” says Sasi and Issar.

The platform’s data collection module enables robots and crawlers to constantly collect data from 1000-plus sources such as the internet, underground/discussion forums, deep web / dark web exfiltrated data and internet exposed applications among others. Next, machine learning enables the entire process of interpreting, parsing, identifying and classifying this data, noise filtering and indexing. This aids in determining the severity of threat, which is eventually shared with the client.

2018 was a watershed year for CloudSEK. With high profile breaches happening all over India and South East Asia, the demand for X-Vigil went up rapidly.

“Trust is the biggest asset of any firm leveraging the internet for any kind of business, financial, commercial, customer support and branding. And trust is today most at risk from actors with malicious intent. This digital risk is what CloudSEK helps reduce for its clients,” the duo adds. The world of fintech, e-commerce, and financial services runs on trust. Be it online money deposits or payment of bills, or usage of app-based cab services or online payment for purchases, trust connects the users to the world of internet technology.

Within two years of the launch of its flagship AI platform, CloudSEK has over 10 clients across India and South-East Asia, including three of the top five Indian private banks. The company has recently raised US$2.1 million in pre-series A round, led by Exfinity Venture Partners, StartupXseed and IDFC Parampara.

Going forward, the company has three clear focus areas: Be the best digital risk management platform in the world, build newer technologies to solve other cybersecurity needs of the client, and expand into more geographies and verticals through channel partnerships with service providers. Building a security analytics hub that can bring together all the inputs, both internal and external, and give a comprehensive view of a company’s security is one of the business problems that CloudSEK is addressing.

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