Kumar Ritesh, CEO, Cyfirma
The past few decades have seen a massive adoption of technologies that have accelerated business communication and operations. Today, we have reached a point where technologies have become such a core aspect of business that any technical glitch or disruption in the technology networks and communication channels can potentially halt the entire business operation. Although we now flaunt advanced technologies to support the seamless operation of a business, there still exist risks that can disrupt this seamlessness. Needless to say, cybercrime is one of the biggest threats that can disrupt the smooth conduction of business operations.
Choosing the right partner that can help prevent cyber threats is paramount for every business. CYFIRMA is an award-winning intelligence and insights provider for organizations that are looking for a complete suite of cybersecurity products and services. It offers cyber threat visibility and intelligence suite and services aimed at keeping an organization’s cybersecurity posture up-to-date, resilient and ready against upcoming cyberattacks. It provides intelligent threat insights and solutions by aggregating, correlating and analyzing threat information from diverse sources. The company helps organizations anticipate the types of cyberattacks that are most likely to occur and provides the most effective recommendations to manage said cyber risks. CYFIRMA helps organizations defend against cyberattacks by supplying organizations with real-time threat visibility and intelligence that enables them to take a more proactive security approach.
Helping Organizations Address the Key Gaps in their Security Landscape
Headquartered in Singapore and Tokyo, CYFIRMA was founded in December 2017 by a visionary and cybersecurity expert, Kumar Ritesh, company’s Chairman and CEO. After working for over two decades, across various facets of cybersecurity, Mr. Ritesh identified three fundamental gaps in the global cyber threat intelligence market:
- Focus on operation intelligence.
- Being reactive in nature.
- Lack of platforms/tools to collate threat information from multiple sources and present as part of a single feed.
CYFIRMA’s focus was to build a cloud-based Cyber Intelligence Analytics Platform (CAP), which is the backbone of the company’s predictive intelligence capabilities. It incorporates cyber-threat visibility with threat hunting, automation and orchestration capabilities. It delivers real-time insights into emerging threats, attack motives and methods, provides strategic and management intelligence on top of operational intelligence, identifies threats at the planning stage of cyberattacks rather than at execution stage, provides early indicators about upcoming cyberattacks and is positioned as a comprehensive platform to connect all the dots about cyberattacks, incidents, vulnerabilities, exploits, technology, industry and data leaks.
The company was formed as a part of Antuit Group – spearheading the latter’s cybersecurity solutions arm. This premier analytics company spotted an opportunity to launch CYFIRMA, a company that would establish a firm footing in the globally relevant cybersecurity space. After the initial success of CYFIRMA, an investment banking firm and Zodius capital, Goldman Sachs – an early investment firm – invested in this new venture. This added a staggering $15M to the company’s coffers, giving it a wide margin of operating and research funds.
A Comprehensive Approach to Cyber Threats
With respect to the traditional approach used by organizations, inclusive of the installation of new security appliances, software and hardware and creating walls, the strategy of layered defense has not worked. The reason is that organizations are always looking inwards without understanding the nature and scope of the threats. CYFIRMA provides a hacker/outside-in view to organizations.
The most important component of this solution is the 900+ virtual agents embedded in the deep/dark web and hackers’ forums. These automated programs silently listen to conversations between hackers and checks for its client names or industry types appearing in these conversations. It records such conversations and forwards the same to a centralized analytics platform.
The company then applies its 5 analytical engines, powered with AI/ML, to process the collected data and formulate its signature three-layered cyber threat intelligence; Strategic Management which optimizes resource allocation and risk management initiatives, Management Intelligence which supercharges the response to cyber threats by integrating insights on attack mechanisms and tools, and Tactical Management that safeguards the cyber posture by blocking unknown malware signatures and malicious domains. Predictive Intelligence and early warnings are part of CYFIRMA’s core capabilities as a leading cybersecurity company.
Kumar Ritesh says, “Our threat visibility and intelligence suite of product and services are at the core of enterprise risk management, cyber advisory and consulting services, managed security and digital risk management.” He adds, “We provide brains to information and cyber security function, Risk management, Regulatory and Compliance verticals to provide a holistic intelligence-driven approach to cybersecurity.” The company has also signed alliance partnerships with multiple IT service, consulting and cybersecurity providers in Japan.
CYFIRMA is releasing an enhanced version of its Cyber Intelligence Analytics Platform (CAP) by April 2019 for the BETA program and market launch is expected by the first week of August 2019. The new CAP product suite encompasses 7 cyber modules; Threat Visibility and Intelligence, Situational Awareness, Cyber Incident Analytics, Cyber Education, Cyber Risk Scoring, Brand/Individual Cyber Risk Monitoring, and cyber Vulnerable Analytics. It also aims to provide multi-dimensional, customized and easy to integrate cyber threat visibility and intelligence capabilities. Mr. Ritesh says, “We will continue to invest in the product suite and product research to be able to provide truly automated threat visibility and intelligence suite of product and services. In the future, our goal is to expand our market reach to all ends of the globe and be amongst the Top 5 Cyber Intelligence Driven Products/Solutions Provider on a global scale.”
