The startup, which announced this week a €700K seed round of funding, currently works with two of the top five European banks to simulate security breaches.
Digital security is the topic du jour when it comes to the digital world. It seems like almost every week Gmail, Target, or Home Depot is announcing that millions of pieces of data have been stolen by digital thieves. The problem lies in the fact that users have culturally adjusted to the idea of letting businesses store personal data about them (address, credit card number, purchasing habits, phone numbers, emails, passwords) more quickly than those businesses have taken to securing said data.
It is almost inevitable that companies – retail, banks, e-commerce, anything consumer-facing, really – overhaul their security, and Paris-based Cryptosense has already begun working with some of them to show them where the holes in their security system lie.
The startup, which announced this week a €700,000 seed round of funding from Elaia Partners, currently works with two of the top five European banks – according to co-founder and CEO Graham Steel – to simulate breaches in their security. The startup began as an academic project that Steel was working on in the U.K.; however, academic obligations to teach distracted Steel from his work, which prompted him to go to the French R&D institute INRIA to pursue his project further.
The company’s goal isn’t to automate White Hat Security – there will always be increasingly creative ways to hack security systems and an automated system will always be one step behind. Instead, Cryptosense wants to automate the time-consuming, low-level checks, while leaving the complicated stuff to the internal security team.
Steel believes that beyond the banking sector, the retail sector is clearly in need of a security overhaul – and he’s right. The most recent iOS8 developments concerning payments, health, and personal (photo) data will make better security a must across not only your smartphone devices, but anything your smartphone plans to communicate with.
