We have been working together in the offensive cyber area at the renowned IDF 8200 unit for seven years. During this time we learned a lot about the cyber area and the available security solutions. 3 years ago, we finished our military service and came up with BitDam. We raised about $3.5m in 2017 from private investors. We were lucky to have investors like Marius Nacht, one of the founders of checkpoint and Moshe Lichtman from Microsoft, who’s immense knowledge and experience have helped us greatly. Indeed, we are getting mentorship from top level people in the industry. Today, we have 20 people in the company, with a majority of R&D personnel. We have customers in EU, US and Israel. Our product is provided as a service as well as on premise. The installation is very simple non-intrusive, and all onboarding is done in just a few minutes.
What challenges does BitDam’s product solve for your clients?
The problem we see today is that there’s a huge gap between the offensive side and the defensive side, mainly because most of the security means today are using reactive approaches. With new threats emerging daily, trying to predict what will be the attacker’s next step, or what will be the new side effects and symptoms, seems almost impossible. Furthermore, participating in this race and chasing new attacks will not be enough in order to protect effectively, because you will always be a step behind the bad guys. Using BitDam proactive approach, we are able to detect sophisticated attacks without any effort, at the first scan. Instead of focusing on the attacks, we focus on the standard applications that we all use daily, like Microsoft word, excel, Adobe and likewise. Those day to day applications often get malicious files and links, making organizations vulnerable to those attacks. We developed a learning algorithm that maps the legitimate behavioral patterns of such applications and can therefore detect deviations from the original code. Any piece of code that was not written by the application provider is likely to be the work of an attacker. BitDam can recognize such deviations and alert or block that content from being executed.
What’s unique about BitDam’s product?
Our proactive approach is what makes us unique. Although there are many solutions on the market, but they mostly focus on the attacks side; some solutions try to study attack symptoms, others try to analyze the location of malicious code or to learn the exploitation methods that attackers are usually using. At the bottom line, all of those solutions rely on the knowledge that they have about the attacks, which changes all the time. Our solution is not related to the attack at all, so no matter what the threat is or how familiar we are with it, BitDam can handle it.
What are the main challenges organizations are facing today, and how does your product help solve them?
As you know, the cyber world is constantly evolving. Security directors have to stay tuned and look for new solutions that can deal with new sophisticated threats. Existing solutions need to be updated regularly to make sure they are protected. This is challenging in terms of the amount of work that should be invested to maintain a secure network overtime. BitDam takes that load off your shoulders, because we can deal with emerging threats and we’re not just limited to what we already know about the attacker or the vulnerability. Since our technology is based on the knowledge about applications and not about attacks, we do not enforce the organizations to install security updates or patches; mainly because we are not sensitive to the super dynamic changes on the attacks methodologies.
As solutions like yours are becoming the prevailing choice for large organizations, what new technologies can we expect to see that will further extend our data security and privacy?
I believe that BitDam’s proactive approach is only the beginning. CISO’s are already understanding that there should be a major change in our way of thinking. My prediction is that in the next few years there will be other companies doing similar work to ours, allowing organizations to effectively protect their information without having to work so hard.
