Featured Startup Pitch: Fortscale is focused on helping enterprises better deal with the human side of the cyber threat problem

By Idan Tendler, Fortscale co-founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: Fortscale turns enterprise big data into user intelligence, making users’ profiles and behavior visible and easy to investigate. Our solution offers enterprises a proactive, intelligence-driven approach to cyber security based on big data analytics to help defend themselves against the scourge of targeted attacks and under-the-radar cyber campaigns that threaten their valuable intellectual property and financial assets.

Product/Service Description

Fortscale makes cyber security teams analytics savvy. Fortscale’s solution extracts big data repositories that are fed by multiple information silos and runs machine learning algorithms on them. The system analyzes historical log data as well as peer activity, and automatically produces a user profile and risk score to help prioritize investigations. This provides the user intelligence needed to discover compromised users, pinpoint malicious insiders and profile users’ access to data. Security analysts don’t need technical expertise in algorithms or cyber warfare, as that comes built-in with Fortscale’s easy-to-use analytics package sets, dashboards, and queries.

Fortscale makes it easy to generate user intelligence, get fast results and reduce risks. It maximizes your ROI by leveraging your existing resources and know-how while focusing remediation efforts on the most serious threats.

Founder’s Story

Prior to founding Fortscale, I was the founder and the head of the cyber security group in Elbit Systems, the largest defense integrator in Israel. There, we initiated strategic and large-scale projects for military and government institutes all over the world. It was at that time I realized that security teams of ‘civilian’ enterprises outfitted with the right tool sets could and should also enjoy the evolving world of big data analytics. Through our relationships and feedback from leading CISOs of Fortune 1000 companies, we focused our efforts on developing and providing them with analytics tools aimed to reveal the current most serious black hole of the enterprise—the user’s activity and behavior.

The Road to Success

Building Fortscale from the ground up included two key challenges: The first, in which I’m happy to say we have succeeded, was to build a multi-discipline team with excellent professionals in cyber warfare, big data technologies, machine learning algorithms, and intelligence; the second was to remain focused with our vision—to provide contextual and actionable user intelligence capabilities to security teams. Additionally, we needed to name the company. We ultimately decided on ‘Fortscale,’ as it is a combination of big data (scale) and security (fort)—the bread and butter of the company.

Market Opportunity

Recent infamous security events like the Target breach and the NSA’s Snowden highlight the need for security analytics tools that provide insights about user activity and behavior. These were live examples of the importance of the individual user as the main vehicle for attacks inside the enterprise—either as a compromised user whose credentials were hijacked during an attack campaign, or a rogue user that decided to slowly gather information and exfiltrate it.

In all cases, profiling user behavior and revealing abnormal behavior is extremely important—you just need to dig into the data and logs, and let our system help you with that. We provide for the first time the comprehensive intelligence and investigation to assist security analysts with this specific mission.

The Competition

The major SIEM vendors (such as HP ArcSight or RSA and Splunk) have analytics capabilities, though they are usually limited in their user-centric approach and in their machine learning algorithms aspect. In addition, Palantir is running some designated projects with leading customers in order to produce visibility on users, though usually they have heavy costs.

The Fortscale team.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

We are the first user-centric intelligence system that enhances the security analyst’s capabilities and provides visibility on users’ behavior. The system does not require collectors or sensors implementation—it extracts existing big data repositories and leverages the existing resources of analysts’ teams, providing analysts with a designated tool set, so they can derive meaningful insights without being experts in cyber warfare techniques or in machine learning algorithms.

Business Model

Fortscale is available on an annual subscription basis.

Current Needs

We have just closed a $10 million round of funding. We sought to accelerate our activity due to demand for our technology and product. We are currently focused on achieving our immediate goals—to establish our business headquarters in San Francisco and to enlarge our R&D and support teams to answer the great demand for our product from Fortune 1000 companies.

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Headquarters: San Francisco