As you may have seen in the press yesterday, this week at Breega we’re celebrating our € 4 m investment in CrowdSec.

CrowdSec is about to change the face of cybersecurity forever. That may sound a little far fetched, but at Breega we think it just might be possible. Read on to find out why 🙂

Each day, each minute, hundreds of cyber attacks are taking place.
According to the University of Maryland a cyber attack takes place somewhere in the world around every 39 seconds. 30,000 websites are hacked each day, and the estimated global cost of cyber attacks is estimated to reach $10.5 Trillion by 2025 (Cybersecurity Ventures)

Even the most sophisticated and costly firewalls often fail to deflect cyberattacks that are becoming more frequent and more varied (phishing, ransomware, password theft, malware, identity theft, 0days…).

Using multiple vectors and a large number of IP addresses that are either stolen or bought on the dark web, hackers disguise their cyber identities to carry out their attacks on individuals, companies, institutions and even, as we saw back in February in France, hospitals battling with the Covid crisis.

CrowdSec CEO Philippe Humeau and his co-founders Laurent Soubrevilla and Thibault Koechlin say it’s time to put a stop to this and beat the hackers at their own game.

They are doing so by creating a global community, a world-wide network of CrowdSec “Watchers” as they are known, that are already present in 86 countries and growing. By adopting a collaborative approach CrowdSec is reinventing cyber security.

As our Co-Founding Partner Maximilien Bacot puts it:

“Digital has become a natural extension of our lives and we need to resolve the societal problem posed by mass hacking. The techniques (or trends) developed over the last 30 years have clearly failed to address the problem. So it seems logical to us to propose a community-based approach, which has already proven effective in so many other areas, yet has not been applied to cybersecurity… until now.« 

A world wide real-time map of hacking – how does it work?

The experienced team of CrowdSec engineers have created a software that, when plugged into any server or network by the Watchers (Devs, Sec Ops, Admins…), will continuously search logs to detect attacks, unusual behaviour or rogue IP addresses.

Once an attack is detected, in any given log at any given time, a report is automatically generated for validation by the CrowdSec platform. If found to be legitimate, the rogue IP addresses are then shared with the network of Watchers around the globe so that they can block them and protect themselves from potential hacks.

Designed for modern environments, like public clouds and containers as well as bare-metal or virtual enterprise architectures, CrowdSec’s software provides a strong first line of defense of unprecedented efficiency and versatility. The counter actions proposed range from simple access prohibition to two-factor authentication, CAPTCHAs, rights limitation, transmission of information to a SIEM or to SecOps desks.

CrowdSec and its Watchers are using collaboration as a weapon and in doing so are generating one of the largest IP blocklists ever created and a real-time world map of hacking activity!

Philippe Humeau says that in the Cyber world, strength lies in unity. Thanks to this solution, several hundred thousand dangerous IP addresses have already been reported and blocked. And with a rapidly increasingly daily adoption rate of CrowdSec’s solution, an increasing number of cyber attacks can be thwarted. This is a new type of diffuse Cyber Threat Intelligence that will indeed be hard for the hackers to hack. 🙂

What’s next ?

As you can imagine, at Breega we weren’t the only VCs to be interested in CrowdSec’s innovative and exciting solution, so why did this dynamic team of experienced entrepreneurs and engineers choose to work with Breega ? CEO Philippe Humeau says that right from the first moment he met with Maximilien and Victor Drault from our investment team, it was a meeting of minds. Breega had a rapid understanding of the CrowdSec value proposition and technology and what was at stake:

“Breega understood straight away what we’re looking to do at CrowdSec and how we’re aiming to do it. They made suggestions to strengthen our business plan and told us how they could help”.

Team Breega’s inhouse ops team was also a winning argument helping to seal the deal :

“When Max described Breega’s in-house Ops team, the way they partner with Breega’s startups to advise, recruit, discuss and basically dig in with the rest of the startup teams, we wanted in!“

From the moment the teams met everyone at Team Breega has been super excited about working with CrowdSec on this incredible adventure and things are off to a great start.

Crowdsec is currently in discussions with large customers, hosting companies, cloud makers and private companies, and will officially launch its commercial offers later this year. The solution will however remain entirely free for its community of Watchers.

To find out how we get on, watch this (cyber) space !

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