Cyphort

Cyphort, Inc. was a Santa Clara, California-based cybersecurity company that developed a software-based advanced threat defense (ATD) platform for detecting, analyzing and mitigating advanced persistent threats, targeted attacks, zero-day vulnerabilities and next-generation malware. The platform combined machine learning and behavioral inspection to detect threats at the network perimeter and to identify lateral movement inside the enterprise, presenting results through a single management console with contextual, prioritized intelligence for incident response. Malware detection covered Windows, OSX and Linux environments, and the distributed architecture was designed to protect physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure.

The product was composed of four components: Collectors, software probes deployed at network locations to gather security data; the Core detection engine that analyzes data from the collectors; the Manager, a web-based portal for administration and threat dashboards; and the Threat Network, a cloud service aggregating threat data across Cyphort deployments and feeding it back into the Core. In later years the company positioned its technology as an "Adaptive Detection Fabric" (ADF) and an "Anti-SIEM" that consolidates threat analytics with event and log data across web, email and lateral movement into an incident timeline, able to operate alongside or without an existing SIEM.

Founding story

Cyphort was founded in 2011 by Ali Golshan (CTO) and Fengmin Gong (Chief Architect), security industry veterans; Gong had previously been Chief Scientist at McAfee, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Palo Alto Networks, and Chief Security Content Officer at FireEye. The company was described as founded by experts in advanced threats drawn from government intelligence agencies and network security companies.

Business model

Cyphort sold its advanced threat defense platform to enterprises as a software-based product and cloud-delivered service, deployable on hardware, virtual machines and cloud infrastructure, with pricing based on bandwidth rather than per-appliance.

Revenue came from sales of its threat defense platform priced according to protected bandwidth, covering software and cloud-delivered detection services.

Traction

The company reported growth in revenue and customer demand over the 18 months preceding its June 2015 Series C, expanding its base of Global 1,000 enterprise customers into multiple verticals. Employee count was reported at 52 on LinkedIn in August 2014.

Latest developments

In 2017 Cyphort released Ponemon Institute research on SIEM optimization (March), announced a Bradford Networks integration (February), and launched the Quilt Security Ecosystem (May). On August 31, 2017, Juniper Networks announced it was acquiring the company for undisclosed terms, with plans to fold Cyphort's software into Juniper's Sky ATP platform and the deal expected to close within a month.