Cyber Security Works (CSW) recently acquired an organization to give CSW a robust set of ‘early warning' vulnerability and threat intelligence capabilities to continue the build-out of its unified threat and vulnerability management platform. The CYR3CON IP was originally developed with grants from Arizona State University (ASU) LightWorks and NEPTUNE, the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research.

CSW acquired the new company's technology to leverage powerful artificial intelligence and dark web mining capabilities to accurately predict how weaponizable vulnerabilities will detonate in the wild and in customer environments. With the acquisition, CSW gains proactive and predictive capabilities that can predict, visualize and identify real threats to client assets based on attacker behaviors - closing the biggest gap in the cybersecurity industry: deploying preventative measures proactively with defensive remediation.

"CSW's strategy is driven by the expansion of its footprint of observable vulnerability and threat data for its growing installed base to support partners and customers in establishing resilience by aligning vulnerabilities with unprecedented threat context across an expanding attack surface," said Ram Movva, chairman and co-founder, Cyber Security Works. "The result is an early warning system that can accurately and continuously predict the probability of how exposed vulnerabilities could be used in cyberattacks - enabling customers to fix its weaknesses pre-exploit and now, pre-breach.

The new technology intelligently sources the necessary data that, when analyzed based on attacker behaviors, predicts the likelihood of an actual attack versus broad-brushed, non-actionable risk management data. This will enable CSW to help organizations gain cyber resilience by mapping their vulnerabilities to real-world threats and prioritizing weaknesses identified through accurate threat context.

"We are extremely excited about this valuable acquisition of IP," said Aaron Sandeen, CEO and co-founder of Cyber Security Works. "We have public alert systems for almost everything today from hazardous weather to earthquakes to missiles. Threat intelligence has always been focused on responding to incidents versus using it to prevent exploits from happening in the first place -- and that needs to change. CSW is delivering an entirely new level of capability to our customers as we expand further into attack surface management to manage threats on a continuous basis and reduce exploitable risk."

"There's an enormous unification shift to analytics-driven, vulnerability intelligence that extends into the broader enterprise attack surface," said Doug Cahill, Vice President and Senior Analyst, ESG Global. "Cyber Security Works' approach in fusing early-warning intelligence with known vulnerability data aligns with the consolidation motions we are seeing in the SOC. Teams are required to extrapolate more value from vulnerability data to manage the attack surface while simultaneously growing its digital footprint."