Awake Security Selected as Finalist for 2018 RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox Contest

Awake Security today has been named one of 10 finalists for the 2018 RSA® Conference Innovation Sandbox Contest. On Monday, April 16, Awake will showcase its Security Investigation Platform to a panel of industry veteran judges and a live audience in a three-minute quick-pitch, competing for the coveted title of “Most Innovative Start Up” at RSA Conference 2018 in San Francisco.

RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest is the leading platform for entrepreneurial cyber security companies to launch their ground-breaking research and innovation in front of venture capitalists, industry experts, senior level business practitioners and thought leaders. The event gives startups the kind of visibility and validation that turn into rapid growth and increased funding. Awake Security was chosen as a finalist for its ability to detect attacks that blend in with business-justified activity, enabling conclusive and rapid response. With exhaustive intelligence from the network, Awake uniquely identifies mal-intent to stop insider attacks, file-less malware, lateral movement and much more.

“If you look at RSAC Innovation Sandbox contestants from the last five years alone, you’ll see more than $1.38 billion in combined investments and 12 acquisitions, proving the businesses that take this stage gain exposure to the right people at the right time to launch them to success,” said Sandra Toms, vice president and curator for RSA Conferences. “The submissions this year were noticeably competitive as we received exceptional entries from across the globe. I have no doubt this year’s presentations will be a must-see at RSA Conference.”

Modern attackers have changed their tactics to circumvent defenses that increasingly are able to discover and block malware. These threat actors now exploit tools that every organization needs to run their business and operate their IT function. Awake not only uncovers this new attacker behavior, but takes all the information and resources an analyst might use to investigate and/or hunt for these threats and puts it at their fingertips, thereby enabling conclusive and rapid response.

Awake uniquely:

• Delivers comprehensive analysis of network traffic by automatically building context on the source and destination entities
• Uses artificial intelligence to score the entities and identify the highest risk devices, users or domains
• Detects the most evasive threats such as file-less malware and exposes attacker command and control infrastructure
• Combines institutional knowledge with machine learning and AI for conclusive response
• Requires no agents, manual configuration or training period

Awake's technology, with seven patents granted and pending, first parses full packet capture data and extracts hundreds of security-relevant signals. The platform then applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically correlate, profile and track internal and external entities such as devices, users and domains into the Security Knowledge Graph™ context data model. Awake codifies entity attributes, behaviors and interrelationships into this model, tracks these against threat intelligence and allows the security team to enrich the context with institutional knowledge about the entity. Through analytics, Awake can then fully expose attacker tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) such as ephemeral command and control infrastructure. In doing so, it goes beyond traditional solutions that perform basic network anomaly detection or simply look for known bad files, IPs and domains.

Without Awake, only the world’s most sophisticated security experts are capable of performing such detailed forensic analysis, utilizing a manual, time-consuming process that typically occurs well after an attack. Awake has democratized this ability, making it accessible to any organization, regardless of size, budget or sophistication. Importantly, Awake delivers this proactive security control at scale and at the speed of the network.

“The biggest challenge confronting security teams today is their ability to distinguish between good and bad when everything looks like normal activity,” said Michael Callahan, CEO of Awake Security. “This observation drove us to deliver a solution that could have a profound impact on the day-to-day work these teams perform as well as the overall security of the organization. Coupled with our growing customer adoption, being recognized as a finalist for the prestigious Innovation Sandbox Contest is great validation that what we've built can have a lasting impact on the world of cybersecurity.”

The RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest will begin at 1:30 p.m. PT on April 16 at the Marriott Marquis in the Yerba Buena Ballroom. Dr. Herbert (Hugh) Thompson returns to emcee the contest, and the panel of five judges includes Asheem Chandna, partner at Greylock Partners; Gerhard Eschelbeck, vice president of security and privacy engineering at Google; Niloofar Razi Howe, tech investor and entrepreneur; Patrick Heim, operating partner and chief information security officer at ClearSky; and Paul Kocher, entrepreneur, researcher and IT security expert. The winner will be announced in front of a live audience later that day at 4:30 p.m. PT.

More information regarding RSA Conference 2018, taking place at the Moscone Center and the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco from April 16-20, can be found at: www.rsaconference.com.

About Awake Security
Awake Security accelerates an organization’s ability to detect threats that blend with business-justified activity, such as file-less malware, malicious insiders, credential abuse and lateral movement. Its Security Investigation Platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to combine data such as network full-packet capture and a security teams’ institutional knowledge, providing analysts with a context data model that correlates, profiles and tracks entities, including devices, users and domains. This combination of autonomously derived entity information and human know-how empowers teams to investigate existing alerts and hunt for malicious behavior in a more rapid, iterative and conclusive manner. The company is based in Sunnyvale, CA and backed by Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. Learn more at http://www.awakesecurity.com and follow Awake on Twitter (https://twitter.com/awakesecurity), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/awake-security) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AwakeSecurity/).

About RSA Conference
RSA Conference is the premier series of global events where the world talks security and leadership gathers, advances and emerges. Whether attending in the U.S., the EMEA region, or the Asia-Pacific region, RSA Conference events are where the security industry converges to discuss current and future concerns and get access to the people, content and ideas that help enable individuals and companies to win, grow and do their best. It is the ultimate marketplace for the latest technologies and hands-on educational opportunities that help industry professionals discover how to make their companies more secure while showcasing the most enterprising, influential and thought-provoking thinkers and leaders in security today. For information on events, online programming and the most up-to-date news pertaining to the information security industry visit www.rsaconference.com.

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