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Empowering cybersecurity with AI: A vision for the UK’s commercial and public sectors?

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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In the age of digital transformation, cybersecurity threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, challenging the traditional security measures employed by many UK institutions. Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI) – a game-changer in the realm of cybersecurity for both the commercial and public sectors. AI’s advanced algorithms and predictive analytics offer innovative ways to bolster security infrastructure, making it a valuable ally for cybersecurity professionals…

  1. Proactive Threat Detection:
    • Function: By continuously analysing vast amounts of data, AI can identify patterns and anomalies that might indicate a security breach or an attempted attack.
    • Benefit: Rather than reacting to threats once they’ve occurred, institutions can prevent them, ensuring uninterrupted services and safeguarding sensitive data.
  2. Phishing Attack Prevention:
    • Function: AI can evaluate emails and online communications in real-time, spotting the subtle signs of phishing attempts that might be overlooked by traditional spam filters.
    • Benefit: This significantly reduces the risk of employees unknowingly granting access to unauthorised entities.
  3. Automated Incident Response:
    • Function: When a threat is detected, AI-driven systems can instantly take corrective actions, such as isolating affected devices or blocking malicious IP addresses.
    • Benefit: Swift automated responses ensure minimal damage, even when incidents occur outside regular monitoring hours.
  4. Enhanced User Authentication:
    • Function: Incorporating AI into biometric verification systems, such as facial or voice recognition, results in more accurate user identification.
    • Benefit: This curtails unauthorised access and adds an additional layer of security beyond passwords.
  5. Behavioural Analytics:
    • Function: AI algorithms can learn and monitor the typical behaviour patterns of network users. Any deviation from this pattern, such as accessing sensitive data at odd hours, raises an alert.
    • Benefit: This helps detect insider threats or compromised user accounts more effectively.
  6. Predictive Analysis:
    • Function: AI models can forecast future threat landscapes by analysing current cyberattack trends and patterns.
    • Benefit: Organisations can prepare and evolve their cybersecurity strategies in anticipation of emerging threats.
  7. Vulnerability Management:
    • Function: AI can scan systems to identify weak points or vulnerabilities, prioritising them based on potential impact.
    • Benefit: Cybersecurity professionals can address the most critical vulnerabilities first, ensuring optimal resource allocation.
  8. Natural Language Processing (NLP):
    • Function: AI-powered NLP can scan and interpret human language in documents, emails, and online communications to detect potential threats or sensitive information leaks.
    • Benefit: It provides an additional layer of scrutiny, ensuring data protection and compliance.

By harnessing the capabilities of AI, the UK’s commercial and public sectors can look forward to a more robust cybersecurity posture. Not only does AI enhance threat detection and response, but its predictive capabilities ensure that organisations are always a step ahead of potential cyber adversaries. As cyber threats continue to evolve, so too will AI’s role in countering them, underscoring its pivotal role in the future of cybersecurity.

Learn more about how AI can support your cyber defences at the Security IT Summit.

5 ways artificial intelligence is powering the creation of next-generation data centres

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Data has become the lifeblood of organisations all over the world. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for data manipulation and management has transformed how we live, work, and interact with technology. 

Just about every industry is seeing exciting applications of artificial intelligence technology in the real-time analysis of large data sets to inform operational decisions. Businesses in the resources sector, retail, agriculture, healthcare, and financial services are rushing to take advantage of enormous business opportunities, but they’ll need specialist AI data centres to accomplish that.

And, with AI increasingly integrating into data centres, data analytics and management demand has reached unprecedented levels. Steve Hollingsworth,  Director at Covenco with over 30 years’ experience in data centre design explores five ways that AI is revolutionising the creation of new data centres and shaping the future of AI-powered solutions in 2023 and beyond…

Enhancing Efficiency and Scalability

The exponential growth of data generated by AI-enabled applications calls for more efficient and scalable data centres. AI is now employed to help analyse historical and real-time data patterns to optimise energy consumption, cooling mechanisms, and server allocation within data centres. By leveraging AI-enabled tools, project managers in charge of data centre design and development can achieve enhanced power efficiency, reduce operating costs, and improve the overall sustainability of their infrastructure. Additionally, AI-driven predictive analytics can enable proactive maintenance, optimised hardware deployment, and reduced system failures, leading to greater uptime and availability.

Streamlining Data Management and Analysis

The rapid adoption of AI has created a significant need for robust data management and analysis. Data centres powered by AI are increasingly adopting machine learning tools to streamline data ingestion, classification, and storage processes. AI can also help to optimise data classification, making it easier for organisations to leverage their digital assets far more effectively. Furthermore, AI-enabled tools are already performing complex analytics tasks like data clustering and anomaly detection, enabling data managers to identify patterns, spot security threats and extract actionable insights much more efficiently.

Intelligent Resource Allocation

The dynamic nature of AI workloads demands intelligent resource allocation within data centres. By leveraging AI-driven solutions, data managers can optimise workload distribution across different servers, GPUs, and storage units, ensuring efficient utilisation of resources. AI tools analyse real-time workload patterns and make intelligent decisions on load balancing, resource provisioning, and task prioritisation. This enables data managers to achieve higher performance, reduced latency, and improved scalability, which is crucial for supporting AI-driven applications with demanding computational requirements.

Security and Privacy Measures

As the reliance on AI-driven analytics grows, ensuring robust security and privacy measures becomes paramount. AI-enabled systems can be pivotal in detecting and mitigating potential security threats within data centres. Using machine learning tools, data centres can identify patterns indicative of cyberattacks, false encryption, anomalous behaviour, or unauthorised access attempts – enabling proactive threat detection and prevention. Moreover, these same AI tools can enhance data privacy by anonymising sensitive information and implementing advanced encryption techniques based on blockchain technologies, safeguarding the confidentiality of valuable data.

Predictive Analytics for Infrastructure Planning

Data managers increasingly try to anticipate and accommodate future demands on the data they manage. AI tools can help data managers analyse historical data usage patterns and trends to provide predictive insights for capacity planning and infrastructure design. By leveraging AI, data managers can also make informed decisions server deployment, storage allocation, and network bandwidth provisioning. This predictive approach ensures that all available servers, storage and networking remain available and capable of meeting the evolving demands of AI applications.

Tomorrow’s digital landscape

The explosive growth of AI-driven applications has given rise to a surge in data demands, requiring data centre managers to adapt and innovate. By harnessing the power of AI at the infrastructure and design level, data owners can significantly enhance efficiency, streamline data management, optimise resource allocation, fortify security, and plan for future growth. As AI continues to permeate every aspect of our lives, the collaboration between AI and data centres will play a pivotal role in driving innovation, powering advanced analytics, and shaping tomorrow’s digital landscape. The synergy between AI and data centres holds immense potential to unlock new opportunities and transform industries in 2023 and beyond.

AI and edge computing taking video surveillance in to new phase of growth

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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New advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and edge computing for video analytics are energising the video surveillance market, with these trends driving the global installed base of cameras to 1.2 billion in 2030.

“By harnessing new advancements in AI and edge computing, all areas of a business can consider surveillance cameras as intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) devices that can gather data and issue alerts without human intervention,” says Lizzie Stokes, IoT Hardware & Devices and IoT Networks & Services Analyst at ABI Research. “The surveillance cameras on the market today are smarter and more powerful than their predecessors, prompting more companies to view cameras as accurate sensors that can predict human behavior.”

Lines of business such as marketing and HR are investing in video analytics solutions and smart cameras to bolster company profits and improve operational efficiency. These expanded use cases are increasing the business value of video surveillance cameras, once considered customary tools reserved for security and monitoring teams. Business units use AI-equipped surveillance solutions to track customer spending and satisfaction and monitor employee health and safety.

Verticals like manufacturing use smart cameras to spot defective products on the factory floor, and municipalities use video surveillance solutions to improve public safety and optimize traffic patterns. New use cases for AI video analytics are transforming the industry as more customers shift investments toward services that mine surveillance footage for operational insights. Video surveillance vendors will continue to evolve their business models and product offerings to meet new demand from verticals and lines of business. Evolutions in camera connectivity technology have introduced new form factors, like advanced body cameras for law enforcement and cellular trail cameras for hunters. These new form factors and use cases will invigorate a market experiencing lower shipment growth.

Most surveillance camera manufacturers today provide AI-equipped cameras, and these smart devices have been essential catalysts in moving cameras beyond their traditional uses in security. Key video surveillance companies include Axis Communications, Honeywell, and Bosch. Motorola has also become an important player in the market after acquiring several popular video surveillance brands, some featuring cloud product portfolios. Chinese manufacturers Hikvision and Dahua continue to be the largest and most controversial companies in the video surveillance market, as more Western governments ban or remove their products from governmental buildings out of concerns for national security.

“The video surveillance industry experienced higher growth a decade ago and has since grappled with international disagreements, privacy concerns, and the threat of increased regulation. Though the market is maturing now, it has the potential to be transformed by new, value-adding use cases and form factors,” Stokes concluded.

Cybersecurity priorities: Why AI-powered threat detection should be in your plans

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By Atech Cloud

The changed world we’ve found ourselves living in since the global pandemic struck in 2020 has been particularly helpful to cybercriminals. Nothing illustrates this so well as the SolarWinds hack, described by Microsoft president Brad Smith as the most sophisticated cyberattack of all time, the reverberations of which have been felt throughout 2021.

Homeworking, the ongoing digitalisation of society, and the increasingly online nature of our lives mean opportunities are about for phishers, hackers, scammers, and extortionists. As we head into 2022, there is, unfortunately, no sign of this letting up. This is why it’s essential for individuals and organisations to be aware of the ever-growing avenues of attack as well as what can be done to mitigate the risks.

So let’s take a look at the most important and significant trends affecting our online security in the next year and beyond while throwing in some practical steps we recommend taking to avoid becoming victims:

AI-powered cybersecurity

Similar to the way in which it is used in financial services for fraud detection, artificial intelligence (AI) can counteract cybercrime by identifying patterns of behaviour that signify something out-of-the-ordinary may be taking place. Crucially, AI means this can be done in systems that need to cope with thousands of events taking place every second, which is typically where cybercriminals will try to strike.

A product we recommend and work with is the Azure Sentinel Solution for all cloud security needs.

To find out why cloud-native security operations is the hot button topic for this year and how to deliver it, read the rest of this article on our blog.

Breaking down AI’s role in cybersecurity

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Data security is now more vital than ever. Today’s cybersecurity threats are incredibly smart and sophisticated. Security experts face a daily battle to identify and assess new risks, identify possible mitigation measures and decide what to do about the residual risk. 

This next generation of cybersecurity threats require agile and intelligent programs that can rapidly adapt to new and unforeseen attacks. AI and machine learning’s ability to meet this challenge is recognised by cybersecurity experts, the majority of whom believe it is fundamental to the future of cybersecurity. Paul Vidic, Director, Certes Networks, outlines how AI and machine learning will play a fundamental role in enabling organisations to detect, react to – even prevent – emerging cyber threats more promptly and effectively than ever before...

Why is Cybersecurity so Important?

Cybersecurity is important because it encompasses everything that pertains to protecting our sensitive data, personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), personal information, intellectual property, data, and governmental and industry information systems from attempted theft and damage.

As the whole world is becoming more digitalised, cybercrime is now one of the biggest threats to all businesses and government organisations around the world.

According to recent reports, cyber criminals exposed 2.8 billion consumer data records in 2018, costing US organisations over $654 billion. Meanwhile, the 2019 Ninth Annual Cost of Cybercrime Study calculated the total value of risk as $US5.2 trillion globally over the next five years. 

The same report identified the use of automation, advanced analytics and security intelligence to manage the rising cost of discovering attacks.

Enter AI and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies address these challenges and are giving rise to new possibilities for cybersecurity threat protection. AI in cybersecurity plays an important role in threat detection, pattern recognition, and response time reduction. Adopting AI in cybersecurity offers better solutions when it comes to analysing massive quantities of data, speeding up response times, and increasing efficiency of often under-resourced security teams.

AI is designed and trained to collect, store, analyse and process significant amounts of data from both structured and unstructured sources. Deploying technologies such as machine learning and deep learning allows the AI to constantly evolve and improve its knowledge about cybersecuritythreats and cyber risk.

For example, by recognising patterns in our environment and applying complex analytics, AI enables us to automatically flag unusual patterns and enable detection of network problems and cyber-attacks in real-time. This visibility supplies deeper insights into the threat landscape which in turn informs the machine learning. This means that AI-based security systems are constantly learning, adapting and improving. 

Risk Identification

Risk identification is an essential feature of adopting artificial intelligence in cybersecurity. AI’s data processing capability is able to reason and identify threats through different channels, such as malicious software, suspicious IP addresses, or virus files.

Moreover, cyber-attacks can be predicted by tracking threats through cybersecurity analytics which uses data to create predictive analyses of how and when cyber-attacks will occur. The network activity can be analysed while also comparing data samples using predictive analytics algorithms. 

In other words, AI systems can predict and recognise a risk before the actual cyber-attack strikes.

Conclusion

Of course, fundamental security measures such as malware scanning, firewalls, access controls, encryption, and policy definition and enforcement remain as important as ever. AI does not replace these; rather, it complements them.

However, as AI and machine learning technologies continue to mature, it is possible to imagine a time when the cybersecurity industry – having long been at the mercy of the malevolent hacker – may finally have the tools to take the lead. 

Skill boost as £18.5m committed to data & AI degrees

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Up to 2,500 people will benefit from £18.5 million of funding to retrain and become experts in data science and artificial intelligence (AI).

The investment is part of the Government’s ongoing strategy to drive skills within the technology sector, supporting more adults to upskill and retrain to progress in their existing careers or find new employment.

£13.5 million investment will fund new degree and Masters conversion courses and scholarships at UK academic institutions over the next three years.

£5 million is also being invested to encourage technology companies to develop cutting-edge solutions, utilising AI and automation, to improve the quality of online learning for adults.

The Adult Learning Technology Innovation Fund, which will be launched in partnership with innovation foundation Nesta, will provide funding and expertise to incentivise tech firms to harness new technologies to develop bespoke, flexible, inclusive, and engaging online training opportunities to support more people into skilled employment.

More than 2.1 million people are currently employed across the tech sector, contributing £184 billion to the economy every year and inward investment to the UK AI sector stood at £1 billion for 2018, which is more than Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland combined.

The Government is also investing in data-driven technologies, such as artificial intelligence, through the modern Industrial Strategy, so tech businesses and people with the drive and talent can succeed.

“UK firms continue to build on our heritage as the home of Artificial Intelligence, and through our modern Industrial Strategy we’re investing in that strength to ensure we remain world-leaders in the field and at the very forefront of the latest technologies,” said Greg Clark, Business secretary.

“These new retraining opportunities and scholarships will ensure people from all backgrounds have the opportunity to move into new and exciting careers, and to shape this innovative industry for years to come.”

Discussing the launch of the new Adult Learning technology Fund, Damian Hinds, Education Secretary, said: “Artificial Intelligence and other new technologies are transforming the way we live and work and have the potential to radically improve online learning and training, so more people can get the skills they need.

“We all have busy lives, juggling work and family commitments so online courses are a great way for more people to retrain or upskill and secure a rewarding career. Investing in cutting edge technologies such as AI will mean we can future proof the online learning experience and ensure it better meets students’ needs.

“This is an exceptional opportunity for technology firms to work with Government to put their ideas into action to help develop pioneering online training opportunities for adults.”

Potential applicants to the AI and Data Conversion courses will hold a degree in other disciplines and scholarships will be made available to support applications from diverse backgrounds. This could include people returning to work after a career break and looking to retrain in a new profession, under-represented groups in the AI and digital workforce, including women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds, or lower socio-economic backgrounds.

The news follows the recently announced multimillion skills package which saw the creation of industry-funded AI Masters, prestigious Alan Turing Institute AI research fellowships, and 16 dedicated Centres at universities across the country to train 1000 extra AI PhDs.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Nuance trumpets $1bn fraud savings

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Nuance says it saved saved organisations more than $1 billion in total fraud costs in 2018 using AI-powered biometrics technology.

Fraud in enterprise contact centres has always been a challenge to manage, but with the explosion of digital channels, organisations today are faced with securing an increasingly complex ecosystem.

At the same time, fraudsters are getting more sophisticated, working through networks and social engineering their way into accounts to commit intricate, devastating crimes, using information they obtain through one attack to gain access to other accounts a given person may own.

Javelin Strategy & Research reports that account takeovers (ATOs) tripled over the past year, resulting in $5.1B in losses and a CFCA report found that the telco industry was hit with nearly $30B in fraud losses in 2018.  

Nuance Security Suite helps enterprises thwart omni-channel fraud through a layered offering of artificial intelligence technologies, including voice and behavioural biometrics, intelligent channel, geo and network detectors and ConversationPrintand DevicePrint algorithms.

Together, these technologies can identify legitimate customers through the sound of their voice, location, device and the way they talk, tap and type – flagging when a call or online interaction is likely fraudulent by analysing typical conversation patterns, voice characteristics and other aspects of an interaction, identifying perpetrators whose profiles do not match those of a given customer.  

“With Nuance voice biometrics, we get a clearer view of customer and fraudster behaviour, so we can keep genuine customers protected and take the fight to the criminals who are targeting their accounts,” said Jason Costain, Head of Fraud Strategy and Relationship Management, RBS Group. 

In less than one year, RBS screened 17 million inbound calls with Nuance Security Suite. Of these, 23,000 have led to alerts, and the bank has found that one in every 3,500 calls is a fraud attempt.

“The ROI from the tool is well over 300%, so as payback our technology deployment has been very impressive,” Costain added.    

As consumers are getting more comfortable with biometric identification and organisations look for innovative ways to authenticate, adoption of Nuance’s Security Suite is growing at a rapid rate.

Recent deployments include Lloyds Banking Group, Allied Irish Bank, Deutsche Telekom, Rakuten Life Insurance and RBS Group. In addition to curbing fraud, Nuance biometrics decreases the overall time agents spend resolving customer queries with one multinational financial services firm reducing agent handle time by 89 seconds after deploying the product.  

“Our customers come to us not only wanting to make their authentication process more convenient for customers but perhaps more importantly to evolve their contact centre security strategy. Our approach is unique in that our algorithms can not only identify and validate individuals by their voice, but also understand what types of conversation patterns fraudsters typically use. That’s powerful when you consider how much money is lost due to fraudulent account access each year, whether through traditional phone channels or in complex cross-channel attacks,” said Brett Beranek, General Manger, Security Business, Nuance Enterprise. 

Research into AI cyber security threat lacking

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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A study of cyber security academic research projects worth €1bn to assess academic trends and threats has found Cyber Physical Systems, Privacy, IoT and Cryptography the strongest cyber security areas to watch – but that Artificial Intelligence is an “apparent omission”.

Crossword Cybersecurity looked at nearly 1,200 current and past research projects from academic institutions in the United Kingdom, United States, Europe, Australia, and Africa, with reported funding of EU projects at over €1 billion.

The database identified several global trends by comparing the periods January 2008 to June 2013 with July 2013 to December 2018, including:

· Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) – Over 100 projects were found in this area alone, a significant figure. The United States appears to be the most active in CPS research, with a focus on securing critical infrastructure.
. Privacy – Projects related to privacy have increased by 183% in recent years.
· Internet of Things (IoT) – Projects with an IoT element have increased by 123% lately, with around 14% of current projects having this characteristic.
· Cryptography – With the promise of quantum computing on the horizon, there has been an influx of new projects that apply the technology to the future of cryptography, with a 227% increase in this area of research (albeit this was from a low base).

Significant differences can also be seen between regions. For example, the EU appears distinctly focused on minimising Small & Medium Enterprises’ (SME) exposure to cyber security risk. Conversely, when compared with other regions, the US has a greater focus on the human component of cyber security. Other US top project funding areas include Cyber Physical Systems (as applied to smart cities and power grids), securing the cloud, cybercrime, and the privacy of Big Data sets (as applied to the scientific research community).

In the UK, the leading research verticals are critical infrastructure and securing the health sector (with 11 current projects each). Current funding across UK projects exceeds £70m, with quantum and IoT-related projects both more than doubling over five years. There are currently nine new UK projects with a focus on Cyber Physical Systems.

The four UK projects with the greatest funding are in the fields of Safe and Trustworthy Robotics, Big Data Security, Cybercrime in the Cloud and Quantum Technology for Secure Communications.

The most notable UK decline was in big data projects, which have dropped by 85%.

Globally, there are currently 52 global projects with a cryptographic focus, and at least 39 current live EU projects featuring a cryptographic element. In the UK, this area has been consistently strong over the last ten years, with 18 projects starting between 2008 and mid 2013, and 19 projects from mid 2013 to now.

Tom Ilube, CEO at Crossword Cybersecurity plc said: “The need to protect critical infrastructure has never been stronger as technology becomes more deeply embedded in every aspect of our daily lives. However, one apparent omission is research solely focused on the application of AI techniques to complex cyber security problems. We hope to see more of that in the future, as the industry works to stay ahead of the constantly evolving cyber security landscape.”

The Crossword Cybersecurity database will be periodically updated, to deliver ongoing insight into the most prevalent cyber security research trends and investment areas. If you are interested in further details, contact the Scientific Advisory Team at Crossword Cybersecurity on innovation@crosswordcybersecurity.com.

Ransomware and phishing top concerns for IT professionals

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Ransomware (24%) and phishing attacks (21%) are the top two concerns among IT leaders in 2018, according to new research.
Barracuda surveyed more than 1,500 IT and security professionals in North America, EMEA, and APAC about their IT security priorities, how these have shifted over the 15 years and what is expected to change within another 15 years.
Other key finding include:
  • In 2003, viruses (26%) and spam and worms (18%) were noted as the top two threats
  • In 2003 only 3% identified cloud security as a top priority. This number has gone up to 14% in 2018
  • 43% identified AI and machine learning as the development that will have the biggest impact on cyber security in the next 15 years
  • 41% also believe the weaponisation of AI will be the most prevalent attack tactic in the next 15 years

Overall, Barracuda says study indicates that while the top security priorities have remained consistent over the past 15 years, the types of threats organisations are protecting against has shifted significantly.

Looking ahead, respondents believe that the cloud will be a higher priority 15 years in the future and that AI will be both a threat and an important tool.

A full 25 percent of respondents said email was their top security priority in 2003, and 23 percent said the same about their current priorities.

Network security came in a close second for both 2003 and 2018 priorities, with 24 percent and 22 percent respectively.

31 percent of respondents chose AI as the new technology that they will rely on to help improve security, and 43 percent identified the increasing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning as the development that will have the biggest impact on cyber security in the next 15 years.

On the other hand, 41 percent believe the weaponisation of AI will be the most prevalent attack tactic in the next 15 years.

“Artificial intelligence is technology that is top of mind for many of the IT professionals we spoke with — both as an opportunity to improve security and as a threat,” said Asaf Cidon, VP email security at Barracuda. “It’s an interesting contrast. We share our customers’ concern about the weaponization of AI. Imagine how social engineering attacks will evolve when attackers are able to synthesize the voice, image, or video of an impersonated target.”

Cylance raises $120m to expand AI cybersecurity platform

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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US-based Cylance has closed a $120 million funding round led by funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and other investors.

The company says the financing will enable it to continue a global expansion and extend its portfolio cybersecurity solutions.

Cylance offers a machine learning-powered predictive endpoint security solution that protects users from unknown cyberattacks, in particular from threats which may not exist for years to come. The company says that since its inception its approach has prevented attacks on average 25 months before the attack was launched and first discovered.

The new funding will bolster the company’s sales, marketing and development efforts to expand its global footprint across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, and extend its product offerings.

“Cylance has proven that artificial intelligence can defend against cybersecurity problems that were previously thought impossible to prevent,” said Cylance CEO, Stuart McClure. “With the most advanced application of AI in endpoint security, Cylance products continuously learn and improve over time, enabling customers to achieve a state of ‘Perpetual Prevention’ and creating a simple silence on the endpoint.”

“Blackstone was an early believer in Cylance’s approach of applying AI to prevent one of the most difficult issues businesses face today – cyberattacks that disrupt operations and damage reputations,” said Viral Patel, Senior Managing Director in Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities group.

“This has been a unique opportunity to participate in funding a company helping to turn the tide against a very serious threat to organizations worldwide,” added Dave Johnson, a Senior Advisor to Blackstone.

“With annual revenues over $130 million for fiscal year 2018, over 90% year-over-year growth, and more than 4,000 customers, including over 20% of the Fortune 500, we have demonstrated market success, scale and traction,” said Brian Robins, Chief Financial Officer at Cylance. “We are honored to have Blackstone Tactical Opportunities expand its commitment to Cylance by leading this round of financing. The investment supports our growth strategy and will enable us to continue on the path to becoming cash flow positive.”