TruSTAR Technology Secures Funding to Accelerate Company Growth and Connective Defense Vision
Security Startup Obtains New Funding as Companies and Policymakers Signal Growing Need for Privacy-Preserving Cyber Incident Collaboration
ARLINGTON, Va., Nov. 16, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- TruSTAR, the enterprise platform for anonymous cyber incident sharing and collaboration, today announced that it has raised $2 million in a seed round of funding led by Resolute Ventures with participation from other Silicon Valley investors. This initial funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand the team to meet the demands of TruSTAR's rapidly growing customer base.
"The recent debate around the passing of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act sent two clear messages. First, businesses believe that timely and actionable information sharing is a vital part of their cyber security strategy. Second, incident sharing cannot come at the cost of privacy," said Paul Kurtz, CEO and co-founder of TruSTAR. "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."
In the past, cross-company collaboration on the most sensitive cybersecurity events came with risks of exposure of corporate or customer data, but with TruSTAR's connective defense mission and technology, companies can share cyber incident data without increasing their risk. By correlating incident data from its members and connecting enterprise operators together with secure collaboration tools, TruSTAR goes further to help enterprises detect, investigate, and mitigate emerging cyber threats far more rapidly than they ever would by working alone.
"Cyber criminals are constantly ten 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."
TruSTAR's distinctive advantage is that it enables companies to rapidly exchange incident information anonymously, ensuring that any attributable information is obfuscated before the data is transmitted. This is accomplished by using private encryption keys that are generated and maintained by the client-side application and by utilizing innovative 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. Connective defense incentivizes security operators to share early in the incident response cycle while managing corporate risk and protecting customer privacy.
"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 cyber security," 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 cyber criminals 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."
About TruSTAR Technology
TruSTAR is the first anonymous cyber incident sharing platform for enterprises. TruSTAR protects and incentivizes enterprises to share cyber threat information through their privacy-preserving sharing, correlation, and collaboration technology. TruSTAR's vetted network includes elite enterprise cyber security teams from across traditional industry and geographic silos. The TruSTAR team has decades of experience in cyber security, information sharing, and enterprise product development. The company is led by co-founders Dave Cullinane, former eBay CISO, Paul Kurtz, former White House cybersecurity advisor and private sector security executive, and Patrick Coughlin, former security operator turned Stanford MBA. TruSTAR is based in San Francisco, California and Arlington, Virginia.
About Resolute Ventures
Resolute Ventures is a lead seed and "pre-seed" investor focused on building a community of Founders who share an entrepreneurial spirit and energy. As a community, they are driven by a need to work on things that matter.
SOURCE TruSTAR
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