Blue Hexagon, a company focused on protecting businesses from cyberthreats through deep learning, is touting an "industry-first" ability to inspect encrypted data in real-time without negatively affecting the speed and performance of the network.
Typically, threat detection strategies involve collecting data logs and then spending time analyzing them to identify and understand patterns and anomalies — often after a breach has already occurred and then disclosing the vulnerability after the attack.
But Blue Hexagon says its detection platform can be used to find threats in encrypted data coming through both on-premises and cloud networks — all in less than a second.
"We pride ourselves on giving a warning in less than a second," Saumitra Das, chief technology officer and co-founder of Blue Hexagon, told Cheddar. "Anything more than that, the threat's already come in and spread to other computers and then you have to go in and hunt for it. It's very hard to deal with things once they're entrenched and spread in your enterprise."
Blue Hexagon is hoping to capitalize on companies' efforts to address the growing privacy concerns that come with the massive amounts of data flowing into today's enterprises.
Global data will grow 61 percent to 175 zettabytes by 2025, according to IDC Research, with much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers.
Further, more than 80 percent of enterprise web traffic will be encrypted this year with an increase of more than 50 percent in new malware campaigns, according to research and advisory firm Gartner.
Blue Hexagon launched in February with a $31 million fund raise from Benchmark Capital and Altimeter Capital. Its customers are primarily companies in the financial services, healthcare and insurance industries.
Financial firms fall victim to cybersecurity attacks 300 times more frequently than businesses in other industries, according to Javelin Research. Banks, in particular, have been making major investments in cybersecurity tools because as their own operations become more sophisticated, hackers become more sophisticated, too.
"They're investing a lot in traditional security technologies," Das said. "A lot of the value we bring is in helping their teams get alerts quickly and be effective… We're trying to push the boundary down to one second before the threat has time to move laterally and infect the whole enterprise."
