CrowdSec raises $5M to transform the global communications landscape with a collaborative solution

The power of Open Source innovation ensures that the worldwide internetworked community can now maintain its own safety

PARIS, FRANCE – Media OutReach – 11 May 2021 – CrowdSec, which puts online security into the hands of users themselves
and has already helped to identify hundreds of thousands of malicious IP
addresses worldwide, has announced a US$5 million round of seed investment from
European VC Breega.

Making the internet a safer place, and empowering everyone with a
rock-solid, free, first line of defense, whether they are individuals,
institutions, SMBs or larger companies is the mission of European start-up
CrowdSec, who is aiming to rethink cybersecurity by creating a collaborative
endpoint detection and response (EDR) system, empowering a novel open-source strategy
to combat attacks on any network, anywhere. This new round of funding will
allow the company to expand its global community of users and contributors, including
in China and Asia, to enhance its functionality, and to recruit new talents to
fuel its expansion.

 

Collaboration and global focus are
keys to CrowdSec’s open-source approach, as outlined by Philippe Humeau, CEO
and co-founder, CrowdSec. “Every year, states, banks, businesses and
institutions spend billions of dollars to protect themselves”, Humeau
commented. “They are nevertheless hacked by groups with much lesser means. This
cyberwar is asymmetrically favorable to hackers, who benefit from time, use
stolen resources and mainly open-source software, and face increasingly
fragmented and permeable perimeters, including Cloud drives, SaaS, VMs, containers,
and VPNs. Our goal is to rebalance the cyber-security game by creating
innovative, free and collaborative software in order to fight, together,
hacking on a global scale.”

 

This is an approach that suits the
Europe-based CrowdSec, where the business community is diverse and steeped in a
rugged individualism developed over centuries. At the heart of CrowdSec is an
independent, open culture that is founded upon its collaborative inclusivity.

 

China and global growth

Open source code has been an essential for the rapid growth of
China’s tech sector and today China is one of the biggest consumers and
contributors of of open source technology. China tech companies such as JD.com,
the world’s third largest internet company by revenue, were early adopters and
it is this pioneering spirt that has attracted CrowdSec to expand its footprint
in China. Through close collaboration with the open source community in China,
CrowdSec is seeking to assist the worldwide internetworked community to now
maintain its own safety.

 

CrowdSec’s team is expected to grow
within 18 months. Launched in December 2020, its solution has already been
adopted in more than 90 countries, with a very rapid acceleration of the daily
adoption rate. CrowdSec’s vision is international in scope and extends across
all continents, including Asia and Greater China. As part of this growth,
CrowdSec is the process of reaching out to key open-source influencers in China
and other parts of Asia.

 

The company is currently in
discussions with large customers, hosting companies, cloud makers and private
companies globally. It will officially launch its commercial offering later
this year, but will remain entirely free for its community. It has already
reported several hundred thousand IP addresses as dangerous. 

 

The arrival of the largest real-time map of hacking  

The ‘bad guys’ of the IT world, the hackers hidden on the ‘Dark
Web’ and elsewhere, use the IP addresses of machines they compromised to
anonymously attack IT assets. CrowdSec’s open-source filtering software blocks
these attacks and tracks IP addresses used against members of its community in
order to redistribute them and thus deactivate the attackers’ strike
capability.

 

When a CrowdSec agent detects an attack, its report is curated by
the platform and, if legitimate, shared with all users so that they can also
protect themselves. This community generates, in real time, one of the largest
IP blocklists in the world.

 

Being able to protect each other without having to trust one
another is also a key benefit. When system administrators, DevOps and SecOps join
forces, they far outnumber hackers. CrowdSec provides them with the tool to
federate. CrowdSec not only locally defends IT assets based on IP behavior, but
also generates the largest real-time hacking map on the Internet. A new
generation of distributed Cyber Threat Intelligence that reshuffles the deck in
the defense of Internet-exposed IT resources.

 

A solution adapted to modern constraints  

Designed for modern environments, such as public clouds and
containers as well as bare-metal or virtualized architectures in enterprises,
CrowdSec’s software provides a strong first line of defense of unprecedented
efficiency and versatility. The different types of remediation offered range
from simple access prohibition to two-factor authentication, CAPTCHAs, rights
limitation, transmission of information to a SIEM or to SecOps desks, for
example.

 

CrowdSec can block port scans, web scans, password attacks,
identity theft attempts, as well as application denial of service, bots, credit
card stuffing or fraud, among many other classes of attacks. By not exporting
logs and collecting only the minimum amount of data (time stamp, attacking IP
and recorded behavior) CrowdSec complies with the European GDPR and, more
generally, respects data privacy.

 

Emphasizing the culture match behind
the US$5 million investment, Breega Partner and Co-Founder Maximilien Bacot
explains, “Digital has become a natural extension of our lives and we
need to provide an answer to the societal problem posed by mass hacking. The
techniques (or trends) developed over the last 30 years have clearly failed to
address this 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.”