Cybersecurity startup Armorblox said that it has built a natural language understanding (NLU) platform for cybersecurity, analysing sensitive information in emails and documents, and providing a new way to detect, alert and protect against data and identity-related attacks. The company has raised $16.5 million series A funding led by General Catalyst, Armorblox.
“Armorblox is using NLU to solve the number one challenge for CSOs: the human layer,” said Maurice Stebila, CISO for Harman, a Samsung company. “By applying NLU, Armorblox is able to address a whole new layer of security that has been inaccessible to other security solutions: the content and context of communications. This has been the biggest challenge and attack vector because hackers know that they can exploit this weakness.”
With employees communicating through emails and documents on a daily basis, people-hacking has become the top attack vector for stealing data. Even when organizations heavily invest in security solutions and employee training, email continues to be the biggest attack vector, responsible for 94% of all attacks. Hackers are bypassing traditional metadata-based email security solutions through social engineering. It is also easy for employees to make mistakes, such as sending a sensitive document to the wrong person.
“Privacy and data breaches are top of mind. However, extortion and fraud attacks are becoming more prevalent as well,” according to the Gartner 2019 Planning Guide for Security and Risk Management. “Common attacks include ransomware, business email compromise, and credential phishing and stuffing.”
“We see Armorblox as a valuable platform using AI to analyze the way people write, and what they write, to catch possible business email compromises that we could not catch otherwise,” said Chuck Drobny, president and CEO of GlobaLogix. “Armorblox found an email spoofing me as the CEO, asking my CFO to make a payment. Other solutions missed it, and this could have resulted in us cutting a check to someone that wasn't authorized.”
“Organizations using multiple security solutions still fall victim to social engineering attacks, employee mistakes and insider threats,” said Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst. “The use of deep learning to understand textual data is a substantive advance for enterprise security. We're excited to see Armorblox solve some of the biggest challenges for CISOs across multiple categories, such as security for email and other communication channels, compliance, and DLP.”
“We're excited to bring the Armorblox NLU platform to market and empower employees to better protect company data. Armorblox combines deep learning and natural language to analyze enterprise data from emails, documents, and other enterprise apps,” said Dhananjay Sampath, co-founder & CEO of Armorblox. “Our mission is to reduce time-consuming workflows for security professionals across detection, incident response, and compliance.”
