AI-based anti-cyberattacks solution from former McAfee assets to enter Singapore

It claims to block 99.9% of cyberattacks.

“The foundation of existing security is broken!” This is a bold statement from two IT experts who used to work at a giant computer security company, McAfee. They claim that the concept of using ‘signatures’ to find and stop cyber attacks is ‘broken’ while the other technologies adopted today are only designed to ‘find the attack faster’. They founded Cylance, whose threat prevention product, CylancePROTECT, introduces a transformational detection and blocking system that is based on artificial intelligence. It claims of being able to stop 99.9% of cyberattacks by applying artificial intelligence to unlock the DNA of code to predict and stop the threat before it starts.

“Cylance wants to elevate the effort hackers must apply to be successful in their attacks. We want to get proactive and preventive again so the damage can be stopped rather than chased,” says Greg Fitzgerald, chief marketing officer at Cylance.

Cylance is founded by Stuart McClure, a former EVP, global CTO and general manager at McAfee/Intel. He is the creator and lead author of the most successful security book of all time - Hacking Exposed. Ryan Permeh, the former chief scientist at McAfee, co-founded Cylance. He is regarded as the brain behind the mathematical architecture and new approach to security. He leads the research and threat intelligence teams digging into the hacker mindset to uncover emerging attack and defense methods.

According to Greg, Cylance literally started in the kitchen of their house and has now grown to over 250 people worldwide. The initial funding came from their own pockets, friends, family and two venture capital firms, Khosla Ventures and Fairhaven Capital. Cylance has now raised US$77m and includes global private equity firms like DFJ, Blackstone, and KKR.

Recently Dell announced that Cylance is the only advanced threat prevention solution for its business PCs. Cylance is also expanding rapidly in Asia Pacific and Europe in 2016. In an interview at the sideline of the GEN15 held in Dallas last Month, Greg told SBR that they are setting up an office in Singapore next year.

How does CylancePROTECT work?

Unlike reactionary signature, heuristics, behavior monitoring and sandboxing, which require an Internet connection and constant updates, Cylance applies artificial intelligence to analyze a file’s characteristics and predict whether it is safe or a threat prior to the file executing on the local host.

Greg explains that CylancePROTECT is a simple, lightweight agent that offers complete protection from system- and memory-based attacks, scripting, spear phishing, zero-day malware, privilege escalations and malicious and potentially unwanted programs, all without the high false positive rates, operational overhead and management complexity of other solutions. It’s now possible to set and meet much higher standards for endpoint security with CylancePROTECT.

Complimenting Cylance’s revolutionary technology product is a set of professional services that provide pre-attack penetration and vulnerability testing, compromise assessments and post-attack incident response. Cylance’s seasoned team of experts also offers specialized consulting in the areas of threat modeling, industrial control systems, medical devices, as well as point of sale and other embedded systems

Greg claims that only Cylance stops more advanced threats and malware that others can’t. It is unique in five areas - it doesn’t rely on an Internet connection for 100% protection; it doesn’t require signature updates; it doesn’t burden end users computing resources; it doesn’t involve complex IT distribution or management; and it doesn’t depend on post-attack heuristics, behavior, sandboxing or signatures to stop the threat.