CyCognito uses its botnet to test customer security, a creative solution compared with more traditional forms of penetration testing, legacy attack surface management tools, and vulnerability testing.

FREMONT, CA: Cybersecurity startup CyCognito raised $30 million in new funding to accelerate its customer acquisition efforts. The Series B round was led by Accel and included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sorenson Ventures, and UpWest. As part of the deal, Eric Wolford, partner at Accel, is joining CyCognito’s board of directors.

Founded in 2018, CyCognito specializes in uncovering and prioritizing risk from attacker-exposed systems and assets. The company’s platform is designed to identify and eliminate critical security risks in an organization’s information technology ecosystem, what it describes as the “shadow risk that attackers seek.”

The CyCognito platform leverages the concept of POLaR – the Path of Least Resistance — to help organizations identify and eliminate hidden risks. The concept works around the idea that attackers look for and target the easiest, least secured ways available to compromise organizations. The CyCognito platform detects and exposes these paths allowing organizations to eliminate them.

“Attackers seek out externally exposed systems and assets that are mostly overlooked by organizations and are easy targets and conduits into corporate networks and data centers,” Rob Gurzeev, co-founder and chief executive officer of CyCognito, said in a statement. “Our next level of funding enables us to greatly increase our market reach, educating and serving the needs of companies in closing these dangerous gaps and gaining an edge on attackers.”

The platform is fully automated and uses internet-scale data collection in combination with machine learning to assess organizations automatically and continuously to discover the paths of least resistance.

In the back end, the CyCognito platform also taps into a reconnaissance process supported by a global bot network that surveils assets from multiple locations around the world at multiple intervals, undetectably and non-intrusively, to reveal the full extent of the attack surface, including critical vectors that other solutions miss.

Notable CyCognito customers include Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, the City of Copenhagen, HumanAPI, Storebrand ASA, Apria Healthcare Group, MacAndrews & Forbes, and Axel Springer SE. Including the new funding, CyCognito has raised $53 million to date.