From endpoint to infra­struc­ture, SentinelOne advances autonomous, AI-driven cyber­se­cu­rity with $120M Series D

In 2019’s Worldwide Threat Assessment, the Director of National Intel­li­gence reminds us that China, Russia, and Iran all have the ​“ability to launch cyber attacks that cause localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infra­struc­ture”. Russia has already proven their capability; state-sponsored hackers took down 3 power distri­b­u­tion centers, or oblenegros, in Ukraine in 2015. They left 225,000 people without light or heat, in the dead of winter, for 1 to 6 hours.

Russia has also been charged with infil­trating the U.S. energy grid (as we have theirs), and is a persistent source of malware for monitoring purposes. And, despite Russia’s cyberwar saber-rattling, any U.S. system meeting national require­ments could withstand a Ukraine-style attack. (We require two-factor authen­ti­ca­tion to access control systems, which is something the Ukrainian oblenegros lacked.)

This is not to say our energy system is impervious; in a 2014 survey, ​“37% of energy sector respondents reported that malware had evaded their defenses” — an uncom­fort­ably large minority. Phishing emails and insecure networks frequently aid these intrusions, including one incident where a hacker compromised an unnamed public power utility and gained access to its control systems.

Energy is not the only sector struggling with the cyber­se­cu­rity challenge. Much of US industry has been targeted with long-running espionage malware: the Russian Intel­li­gence Service’s Havex program has impacted as many as 2,000 infra­struc­ture sites — across sectors — since its launch in 2010.

Infra­struc­ture is only part of endpoint security’s changing landscape, but the potentially lethal effects of its disruption make it especially critical to protect. While global growth in smartphone and computer ownership drives the number of vulnerable devices, popular new devices, like smart speakers, increase the variety as well. These expand the field of endpoint protection, too. Each new entry point in a network is another possible attack vector: your fitness tracker; your smart bulb; your gaming console.

SentinelOne can protect every device, from industrial control systems to the smart speaker on your counter. Their platform blocks known threats, identifies new ones with AI-driven behavioral analysis, and auto­mat­i­cally isolates and halts exploits. They accomplish all of this with software that requires so little memory it can be deployed on even the smallest devices.

In the power grid hack, every part of the system — from the malware-infected computers, to the remotely-accessed work­sta­tions on the SCADA system, to the breaker controls themselves — could have been protected by SentinelOne. Their software auto­mat­i­cally eliminates new threats, like the malicious industrial control firmware, and disables old ones, like the BlackEnergy or KillDisk malware. By giving its protective software an AI ​“brain” that catches any exploits it missed, SentinelOne fully combines endpoint protection and endpoint detection and response.

As our envi­ron­ments become more digitized, and as formerly analog machines migrate to the vulnerable Internet of Things, device and data protection become critical for society to function. Most exploits are executed subtly and are only detectable for seconds or minutes. SentinelOne responds to all levels of threat quickly and decisively, without having to pull a human into the loop, without degrading performance, on even the smallest computing footprint. Computer security threats are largely automated — the future of threat protection will be, too. We’re proud to support SentinelOne as they make the digital world a safer place.