EiQ Networks now has millions of dollars in fresh capital and a new name, Cygilant.
The firm announced on Sept. 19 that it had raised $7 million in an investment round headed by Arrowroot Capital. To date, the company has raised $38 million. Cygilant plans to use the funds to hire more security engineers to support its security-as-a-service offering and advance its SOCVue platform, which uses a combination of technology and human expertise to provide customers with continual security monitoring.
And many times, those customers are serious about security but may not have the IT security talent in place to mount a suitable defense against today’s threats.
“Our typical customer tends to be an organization of about 250 to 10,000 employees that is serious about protecting customer data, PII/PHI [personally identifiable information/protected health information] data, trade secrets and intellectual property from cyber-attacks and/or needs to comply with regulations such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FFIEC, GLBA, SOX, NIST and more,” said Vijay Basani, CEO and founder of Cygilant.
“Our customers have lean IT teams that are tasked with continually improving their cybersecurity and compliance posture affordably. Our global SOC [security operations center] teams work as an extension to our customer’s lean IT teams, providing around the clock human intelligence to detect, analyze and respond to incidents,” continued Basani.
With one less thing to worry about, IT departments can get back to running a tight ship.
“In a market where there is, by some accounts, a shortage of more than 1 million cybersecurity professionals we bring stability and expertise to all organizations, even very large ones such as Equifax,” Basani said. “We provide continuous monitoring and human expertise that allows companies to manage their IT resources more effectively and allows their IT teams to sleep better at night.”
Earlier this month, Equifax disclosed that it had been hit with a massive data breach affecting 143 million U.S. consumers. Hackers accessed a trove of sensitive personally identifiable information including names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers. The credit card numbers of 209,000 consumers were also accessed.
Having a security company like Cygilant keeping an eye on things could have averted the Equifax scandal, Basani.
“If Equifax had been using our SOCVue services then Cygilant’s SOC team would have alerted Equifax of unusual and anomalous activity on their servers along with remediation guidance, detected vulnerabilities through SOCVue’s continuous vulnerability management service, and worked with them to plug vulnerabilities,” said the executive. “We would also have identified missing patches and provided an auditable work flow to apply patches in a timely manner to prevent the breach in the first place.”
