Score another win for cybersecurity start-ups: TruSTAR has raised $2 million in a seed round of funding.
In the past, cross-company collaboration on the most sensitive cybersecurity events came with risks of exposure of corporate or customer data, but TruSTAR is addressing the concern with a “connective defense mission” and technology. It correlates incident data from its members, and connects enterprise operators together with secure collaboration tools. So, TruSTAR enables companies to rapidly exchange incident information anonymously, ensuring that any attributable information is obfuscated before the data is transmitted.
“The recent debate around the passing of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act sent two clear messages,” said Paul Kurtz, CEO and co-founder of TruSTAR. “First, businesses believe that timely and actionable information-sharing is a vital part of their cybersecurity strategy. Second, incident-sharing cannot come at the cost of privacy “TruSTAR is committed to empowering companies to work together on cyber threats through privacy-preserving information sharing and collaboration. This new investment will allow us to continue to expand and advance our mission of connective defense.”
TruSTAR uses private encryption keys that are generated and maintained by the client-side application and by using redaction technology to identify and remove private data before sharing. All shared data is then correlated so that the sharer, and the community can immediately see all related information from other incident reports as well as other open source and external intelligence feeds. TruSTAR users can also pose questions, share more detail or collaborate in real-time through an end-to-end encrypted chat capability.
"Cyber-criminals are constantly 10 steps ahead of us because they share threat and vulnerability data openly and collaborate to carry out malicious acts. We need to ask ourselves: why aren’t we doing the same when it comes to our defenses?” said Richard Clarke, TruSTAR advisor and former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism for the United States. "The benefits of stronger cooperation on cyber-threats are well understood, and that’s why TruSTAR’s vision of connective defense must become the reality.”
Led by Resolute Ventures with participation from other Silicon Valley investors, the initial funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand the team.
We decided to invest in TruSTAR because we firmly believe in the team, the technology and the timing of this innovation to change the game in cybersecurity,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, co-founder and partner at Resolute Ventures. “We are confident that TruSTAR’s platform, combined with its vision of connective defense, will help companies drive to mitigation faster and increase the costs for cyber attackers.”
Added Kurtz, “In order to make progress and beat the cybercriminals at their own game, we must move from an individualistic model to one of connective defense. True progress will only be made once we share our data, pool our expertise and connect our response.”