Fidelis Cybersecurity announced on Sept. 18 that it has raised $25 million in a new round of funding to help grow the company’s platform, which provides multiple capabilities for network and endpoint security.
This has been a busy year for Fidelis as the company has expanded its core Elevate Platform with multiple new features, including deception as well as a managed detection service. The company also named a new CEO in April, bringing on board Nick Lantuh, who is well-known in the security industry for his work as the founder and president of Netwitness, which EMC’s RSA security division acquired in 2011.
“I’ve been on board for five months now, and we’ve really been spending a lot of time digging into the innovation that we have currently in the company and the innovation that we want to bring to the market,” Lantuh told eWEEK. “What we want to do is build out the ecosystem around our primary platforms and increase visibility of our network, endpoint and deception solutions to hunt properly for bad things.”
Founded in 2002, Fidelis Cybersecurity was acquired by General Dynamics in 2012 and subsequently sold to Marlin Equity Partners in 2015. The company has also expanded in recent years via acquisition, picking up incident response vendor Resolution1 in 2015 and deception vendor TopSpin Security in 2017.
Threat Hunting
While Fidelis’ portfolio includes multiple capabilities, including automation and orchestration, Lantuh said he likes to think of the company as being well-positioned in the threat hunting space. Fidelis provides raw data collection that enables organizations to identify and respond to threats.
“We’re collecting all of the session analytics, all the session data, all of the metadata and all the content, off the network, and then … we’re adding that in with all of the raw data that we’re collecting at the endpoint,” he said.
All that raw data is then used to help provide visibility and enables Fidelis’ users to identify threats. The data is also used to help inform the deception capabilities of the platform to trick and trap attackers.
“We’re really providing a single environment, or single pane of glass if you will, for doing threat hunting the right way,” Lantuh said.
Among the newest parts of the Fidelis portfolio is Managed Detection and Response Service (MDR), which was announced on July 31. Lantuh noted that Fidelis has staffed its MDR service with former U.S. Air Force cyber-analysts and threat hunters.
“Not everybody has the resources or the know-how or the knowledge to run [Fidelis Elevate] to its fullest,” Lantuh said. “Some of our biggest customers were asking us for help running the platform, so that’s why we did end up coming out with the service.”
Fidelis MDR is not intended to be full-fledged managed security service provider (MSSP), Lantuh said. Rather, the goal of MDR is manage Fidelis’ own product platform for customers.
In terms of competition, Lantuh said there is competition in the market for different parts of the Elevate platform, including endpoint detection and response (EDR), deception and network security component.
“We’re not providing visibility to organizations that is log based or netflow based; we’re providing a much richer set of data to be able to make decisions from,” he said. “Ultimately, what we’re providing is a speed to resolution capability.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.