The award recognizes CYDEF’s unique approach to cybersecurity, which is built on the principle of exception management

Ottawa, Canada, May 18, 2023 — CYDEF, known for its unique approach to cybersecurity, has been named one of the top 100 CyberTech companies in the world for the third year in a row.

The CyberTech100 list is published annually and recognizes the most innovative and effective companies in the cybersecurity industry. An Advisory Board and the FinTech Global team select 100 firms out of over 1,000 entries.

“We are honored to be recognized once again as one of the top CyberTech companies in the world,” said CYDEF CEO, Steve Rainville, who has been in cybersecurity for over two decades. “Our team has developed something truly exceptional. This recognition is a testament to their hard work and the innovation behind it.”

The criteria for CyberTech100 include industry significance of the problem being solved, growth metrics, innovation of the solution, potential cost savings, efficiency improvement, impact on the value chain and/or revenue enhancements, and how important it is for financial institutions to know about the company.

CYDEF has earned a reputation for its unique approach to cyber threat hunting and endpoint security. The company has a novel approach that leverages the best of machine learning and human oversight to produce better outcomes.

Rather than using AI to score threats and then deciding whether or not to investigate, CYDEF has built a solution on the principle of exception management.

“Once we eliminate what we know is safe, everything else is treated as a potential threat and investigated accordingly,” added Rainville.

“We’ve consistently detected threats that bypassed industry leading solutions,” said CYDEF COO, Elana Graham, who has a background in engineering. “There is a gap that is left from automated threat scoring because only higher scores are reviewed by humans. This leaves customers vulnerable to more sophisticated attacks. It’s not enough to only investigate some, or even most, of the potential threats. To keep up with modern day attacks, humans need to have eyes on everything. Before CYDEF, this simply wasn’t possible.”

CYDEF’s patented SMART-Monitor technology is used to make the analysts’ jobs more efficient so that humans are making the important decisions on what is safe or not.

“One unprecedented component of our solution is that it becomes more efficient as we onboard new customers. This keeps our costs low and enables us to scale quickly,” said Mark Levine, Chief Product and Technology Officer at CYDEF.  “We have tripled our endpoints under management over the past 12 months without having any significant impact to our Analyst team.”

Poised to triple its growth again in 2023, the results speak for themselves. In the five years since its launch, no CYDEF customer has suffered a successful ransomware attack or had a threat that spread to more than a few devices.

“We’ve essentially taken threat hunting from an art to a science,” added Rainville. “We review all unknown activity using a rigorous, repeatable process that yields consistent results.”

The Fintech industry is by far one of the most targeted industries for cyber crime. Criminals will spend more time finding ways to bypass security layers because the payout is much bigger. And regardless of the security measures in place, sometimes all it takes is one good phishing attack on a busy employee. Once criminals succeed, they may go undetected for weeks or even months.

The CYDEF solution is monitoring post-exploitation activities, that is, activities that have already happened on computers and servers.

“Having a layered defense that uses a variety of security controls and tools that are inherently different from each other is critical. For the best security outcomes, you need tools that address risk and governance, tools that are preventative, and tools such as ours that are designed to detect what previous layers missed, due to detection methodologies,” said Michael Noory, Senior Threat Hunter at CYDEF.

The company still encourages the use of automated cybersecurity tools, but how heavily you rely on them is tied to your risk tolerance.

“The more you rely on automated systems, the higher the chance you’ll miss context that could only have been caught by human eyes. For example, the same mechanisms which allow malware to evade antiviruses are the ones which allow threat hunters to detect malware more easily – like obfuscation,” explained Noory.

Noory describes threat hunting as the review of historical commands that have already run and have already been allowed by preventative software. A threat hunter is only looking for the presence of criminals who have successfully bypassed those automated controls.

CYDEF is the only company that has made it possible for threat hunters to review 100% of the telemetry collected, ensuring the gap left by automated tools is fully addressed.

“As great as ‘full AI’ sounds in marketing, we need a good balance of both automation and human involvement. Fortunately for me,” Noory added with a grin, “my job is still safe.”

For FinTech and other high-risk industries, that makes CYDEF an excellent option as a final layer in a robust defense in depth strategy.

“An exception management approach is especially relevant for the FinTech industry,” added Graham. “Ruling out what we know is acceptable and reviewing everything else is working extremely well. And it provides real peace of mind for our customers.”

“As challenges such as ransomware, phishing and data breaches still plague financial institutions, there has never been a more important time for businesses to use CyberTech solutions,” said FinTech Global director Richard Sachar. “This year’s CyberTech100 list arms companies with the necessary information to find the industry change-makers who are providing companies with the opportunity to be well protected against these threats.”

The full list CyberTech100 list and detailed information about each company is available to download at www.CyberTech100.com.

About CYDEF

CYDEF built the only cybersecurity solution based on exception management instead of threat scoring.

Our AI serves our analysts to make their jobs easier and exponentially more efficient, not to make decisions that only humans should make.

By managing the exceptions, CYDEF analysts can review and investigate 100% of endpoint activities quickly. This unique approach is why we consistently detect both known and unknown threats others can’t.

As a managed service, we provide the labour and the technology to partners and customers around the world.

With CYDEF, threat hunting is no longer an art. It’s a science.

For more information, visit https://cydef.ca/.

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