Lupovis has secured a pre-seed investment of over £615,000 from a syndicate co-led by Techstart Ventures, investor of seed capital and Nauta Capital, a pan-European venture capital firm together with an investment by the University of Strathclyde itself. According to data on HubSpot the average pre-seed round for start-ups is just above £360,000, putting Lupovis significantly ahead of many other technology companies in its first round of funding.
With the global costs associated with cybercrime predicted to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025 and organisations getting targeted with ransomware every 11 seconds, cyber defences have never been more critical. Lupovis has created a deception solution that leads cyber attackers and ransomware away from high value assets, delivering a pro-active defence which turns the ‘hunter into the hunted’.
Xavier Bellekens, the CEO of Lupovis, said: “We are thrilled with the opportunities this investment creates to develop Lupovis’ dynamic deception capabilities. Our system uses artificial intelligence to create scenarios which mirror the existing infrastructure of an organisation and engages the attacker into believing they are progressing towards assets of value, turning networks from a flock of sheep to a pack of wolves. We are in a unique position where we have unrivalled data on attacker techniques, methods and behaviour. We will feed this data into our platform, so our customers will always remain one step ahead of attackers, predicting their next move, long before they actually make it.”
Lupovis deploys a network of collaborative decoys to lure the attacker away from assets, whether it be personal data or sensitive information, or stop hackers trying to shut down systems to damage business continuity. Lupovis, an amalgamation of the Latin words for wolf (lupus) and sheep (ovis), offers the attacker incentives that steer them on a certain path. Once an adversary has penetrated a network, the system entices them by creating an offensive deception environment, which engages the attacker from the minute a move is made within the network.
“The system responds dynamically to the behaviour and skills level of the attacker by using incentives and gamifying the vulnerabilities that engage the hacker. The longer the attacker is engaged, the longer the system is blocking malicious actions that would otherwise stop the network functioning. The benefits are uninterrupted business continuity, whilst simultaneously gathering information on the hacker’ skills and strategies that inform security teams of the optimum counter-measure that arrests the breach,” continued Bellekens.
