Israeli cyber security firm MazeBolt Technologies has completed a $10 million round of existing shareholders equity financing, and has added two leaders in the cybersecurity field to its advisory board: Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Amichai Shulman, former founder and CTO of Imperva.
MazeBolt specializes in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack mitigation – preventing nefarious actors from flooding the victim’s platform or website with heavy, focused traffic, thereby temporarily rendering it unavailable.
MazeBolt RADAR is a patented technology which dramatically reduces DDoS risk. Commercially introduced last year, after more than three years of development and Beta testing, RADAR continuously tests the entire attack surface of networks and services for DDoS vulnerabilities, without any disruption to production availability. Once identified, all existing vulnerabilities can then be pre-emptively corrected and the fixes validated, again without disruption.
The company’s technology enables a transformation of DDoS mitigation from requiring reactive manual recovery to near perfect automatic mitigation of all DDoS attacks for any web-facing network, regardless of the DDoS mitigation platform it is in use with.
RADAR data show that about 48% of all organizations are exposed to DDoS attacks, with the sectors most affected being banking, fintech, online payments, telecom, gaming and government bodies and infrastructure.
“Our immediate key challenge is to bring to the attention of cyber security decision makers the fact that this first of a kind product is now available and has been extensively validated in commercial use across multiple industries and environments,” said Matthew Andriani, MazeBolt’s CEO and founder.
“During 2021, our first year of full commercialization, we were pleased to see that every completed proof of concept resulted in a new RADAR customer,” he said. “Furthermore, to date, no customer that fully implemented MazeBolt RADAR has suffered a successful DDoS attack.”
DDoS attacks are not the most harmful of cyber attacks, but they can still do damage: earlier this year the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reportedly carried out a strike that crippled government websites.
Around the time of the attack, a series of tweets was posted on a Twitter page supposedly affiliated with Iran’s IRGC stating in Persian that “the Zionist regime will never forget tonight” with the hashtag “this is just the beginning.”
In response to that attack, Menny Barzilay, partner at Cytactic and CTO at the Cyber Research Center in Tel Aviv University, noted that “It is not very clear why the IRGC would conduct such an attack. It does not improve their reputation as sophisticated cyber threat actors – if anything, it harms it. The DDoS attack, which was very low in scale, and which only affected a small number of websites, isn’t something to be proud of.”
That said, noted Barzilay, there is always a reason to be prepared. “In the physical world we have no common border; but in cyberspace, borders do not exist. The Iranians understand that, as they are constantly improving their offensive cyber capabilities. We should all expect that Iranian attacks against Israeli targets will only increase, both in frequency and sophistication.”