BalaBit secures $8m for business-friendly IT security

Using the strong financial backing by C5 Capital, BalaBit aims to aggressively establish its revolutionary new security concept called Contextual Security Intelligence™ on an international scale. Adopting new information technologies is the key factor of competitiveness today, and IT security is often complex for any company or organisation. Security control can hinder IT projects and other business processes. In the last decade, companies invested significant amounts of money into monitoring technologies mainly for IT management and compliance reasons, but not for IT security. It seems that for companies today security means control, and this is what Contextual Security Intelligence aims to change and establish for business-friendly IT security.

“Control tools are often inefficient against human intelligence and behaviour. Control is ideal to protect against automatic attacks executed by machines but often fails against individual behaviour,” said Zoltán Györk?, CEO and co-founder of BalaBit. “If IT security officers keep increasing the control, they will not be more successful in maintaining the required security level, and may encounter user resistance. Instead, they should explore what happens in their network and interfere if necessary. This is exactly what Contextual Security Intelligence is about. We are working hard to launch a new generation of IT security product to help companies focusing their security resources and replacing some old-school control tools, in the spirit of business efficiency.”

Control failures are in today’s headlines: Sony, Target, Adobe and eBay all had serious security breaches in spite of having sophisticated security controls. Often, the most costly data breaches are well-prepared crimes by insiders or by external attackers who gained internal access to get sensitive company data or infect the network.

“We believe that managing human risk is an under-invested part of information security. BalaBit offers a market-leading suite of products to address this threat. A core component of our investment approach is our ‘all hands’ engagement, which means we bring all our resources to bear for a small number of companies in order to actively drive value. BalaBit is a representative case as it seeks to launch new products and expands overseas,” said Nazo Moosa, Managing Partner at C5 Capital. "We were drawn to BalaBit’s first class software development talent and the team. In addition to building out the sales reach of the existing log management and IT security audit products, we are eager to capitalise on the technological innovations inside BalaBit.”

BalaBit markets its security products in the UK through a series of resellers and system integrators. Major customers in Europe for BalaBit’s innovative security technology include academic institutions such as Exeter University, banking and financial organisations such as Handelsbanken and Fiducia IT AG and telecom organisations like Telenor.