Dragos Inc, an industrial control system (ICS) cybersecurity company made up of industry experts with the vision of securing global industrial infrastructure, has secured USD10 million in Series A venture capital funding from co-lead investors Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and Allegis Capital, with additional support from DataTribe, a cybersecurity startup studio that initially funded Dragos.
The Series A round will be used to increase the company’s workforce to meet rising customer demand, generated in part through key partnerships with Deloitte, the global audit and financial advisory services firm, and CrowdStrike Inc, a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection.
Dragos is the first ICS cybersecurity investment by EIP, which focuses on investments that seek to optimise energy consumption and improve sustainable energy generation.
Dragos has attracted attention for recently producing a report on CrashOverride, the malware used to temporarily interrupt power in the Ukraine in a widely publicised cyber-attack last December. CrashOverride is the only known malware that disrupts the electrical grid and only the fourth known type of malware to be specifically tailored toward ICS overall.
Founded May 2016 and funded until this point with a seed round of USD1.2 million from DataTribe, Dragos has built the first industrial cybersecurity ecosystem. This consists of three core offerings and an assessment tool – the Dragos Platform, the Dragos Threat Operations Center, Global ICS Intelligence, and CyberLens network assessment software. This combination gives customers access to technology to monitor and respond to threats in the ICS, along with intelligence to make informed decisions about threats. Services range from threat hunting to incident response, as well as lightweight software for routine assessments.
The company’s biggest technological differentiator is its behavioural analytics. Instead of “anomaly detection” and other types of machine learning-driven technologies that are hitting the market, the approach of Dragos is to codify human experience facing human adversaries. It identifies adversary tradecraft and turns it into behavioral analytics. As a result, defenders get context of what is going on and recommendations on what to do next, not merely a series of alerts.
“Dragos exists to safeguard civilisation,” says Robert M Lee, the CEO of Dragos. “Critical infrastructure powers the global economy and the fabric of modern society. We all strongly believe that civilian infrastructure should be off limits to any adversaries, no matter where the infrastructure is located in the world.”
Dragos was founded by ICS cybersecurity experts Lee, Jon Lavender and Justin Cavinee, all veterans of the US intelligence community. There they established a first-of-its-kind mission for the US government to identify, analyse and respond to nation-states launching ICS-focused cyberattacks.
“Industrial control systems are unique unto themselves – hybrid digital and analog environments with very different operational temperaments,” says Bob Ackerman, the founder and a Managing Director of cybersecurity investment specialist Allegis Capital. “Unless you have lived your life in this environment, you can’t truly appreciate how different or complex ICS systems are. With Dragos, we invested in the “A” team.”
“Protecting the integrity of the grid has always been a top priority for utility operators,” says Sameer Reddy, a Vice President at EIP and co-leader of the Series A financing. “One of the critical challenges is access to sufficient human capital. The Dragos platform, which is built and managed by true ICS cybersecurity experts, provides significant force multiplication to ICS operators around the world.”
“Energy is essential to our economy and way of life. As a result, energy infrastructure is increasingly a target,” says Thomas A. Fanning, Chairman, President and CEO of Southern Company. “As a founding investor in Energy Impact Partners, Southern Company is proud to support enhancing the resiliency of critical infrastructure, in order to better protect the communities where we live and serve.”
