Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Enumerated Future
Recorded Future
On Thursday, Recorded Future — a threat intelligence company little known outside cybersecurity go rounds — announced its sale to venture firm Insight Partners for $780 million.
The deal bought out high-profile investors in the throng, including Alphabet’s GV (formerly Google Ventures), the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and Reed Elsevier, among others.
The acquisition comes companies are looking to yield fruit a neglected tool in their cybersecurity arsenal: predictive intelligence, which can help them tell where and how the next cyberattack settle upon come.
Recorded Future collates data from a wide variety of sources, including dark web forums, body infrastructure and international news alerts, and turns it into information that customers can use to predict new attacks. It’s a little bit similarly to a financial services terminal, only focused on threats instead of market moves.
It’s not unlike battlefield intelligence, CEO Christopher Ahlberg suggested, where the goal is to understand the current geography and movements of criminals or rogue nation-states.
The product fills a common gap in uncountable cybersecurity organizations. Most mid-size and large companies have a security operations center or SOC, which typically manoeuvres the most immediate problems — denial of service or ransomware attacks, or incoming email phishing attempts. Companies also hub their spending on regulatory functions and practical, nuts-and-bolts security measures, like triaging and cleaning up significant quandaries.
But in the process of focusing on the “now,” companies often outsource or ignore the “before” picture of gathering intelligence and the “after” picture of considering cybercrimes.
Ahlberg says that’s starting to change.
“It used to be that five years ago, we were basically hawk threat intelligence to threat intelligence people,” Ahlberg said. “The big breakthrough is how we do security today, [cybersecurity executives] possess started looking at having an intelligence-driven security program. Who would go to war without an intelligence capability? We have to find a way to nobble the bad guy, whether that’s in some sophisticated way or some really obvious way.”
The market for threat intelligence tools could thrive from $3.83 billion in 2017 to $8.94 billion by 2022, or around 18.4% yearly, according to an estimate by explore firm Reports and Reports.
Ahlberg envisions competing with the largest intelligence agencies by digging deeper across the internet, “down to the swear at electrons if we have to,” he said.
As threat intelligence becomes more common, Ahlberg hopes the company will be competent to “punch of its weight” and compete with companies like Palo Alto, FireEye, Cisco and IBM that also come forward threat intelligence as part of broader operations platforms.
Customers already include government agencies and Fortune 500 corporations from a cross-section of industries, including Fujitsu, T-Mobile, Fannie Mae, Gap, Accenture, Regions and Verizon.
“We are looking at getting into the turned on school cafeteria, and getting a seat with the cool kids,” he said. “We are also looking at building out a profession of presage intel.”