CrowdSec raises $5M to transform the cybersecurity landscape with its collaborative firewall

Paris, May 5th, 2021 — CrowdSec, the first community firewall, which has already helped  identify hundreds of thousands of malicious IP addresses worldwide, today announced a $5 million seed round from Breega.

Start-up CrowdSec aims to rethink cybersecurity by creating a collaborative endpoint detection and response (EDR), empowering a novel strategy to combat hacking on a global scale: collaboration. This funding will allow the company to expand its community of users and contributors, enhance its functionality and recruit new talents to fuel its expansion.

The arrival of the largest real-time map of hacking

Hackers use the IP addresses of machines they compromised to anonymously attack IT assets. CrowdSec’s software blocks these attacks and tracks IPs addresses used against members of its community in order to redistribute them and thus reduce the hackers’ strike force.

When a CrowdSec agent detects an attack, its report is curated by the platform and, if legitimate, shared with all users so that they can also protect themselves. This community generates, in real time, one of the largest IP blocklists in the world.

Being able to protect each other without having to trust one another is also a key benefit. When system administrators, DevOps and SecOps join forces, they far outnumber hackers. CrowdSec provides them with the tool to federate. CrowdSec not only locally defends IT assets based on IP behavior, but also generates the largest real-time hacking map on the Internet. A new generation of distributed Cyber Threat Intelligence that reshuffles the deck in the defense of Internet-exposed IT resources.

A solution adapted to modern constraints

Designed for modern environments, like public clouds and containers as well as bare-metal or virtualized architectures in enterprises, CrowdSec’s software provides a strong first line of defense of unprecedented efficiency and versatility. The different types of remediation offered range from simple access prohibition to two-factor authentication, CAPTCHAs, rights limitation, transmission of information to a SIEM or to SecOps desks, for example.

CrowdSec can block port scans, web scans, password attacks, identity theft attempts, as well as application denial of service, bots, credit card stuffing or fraud, among many other classes of attacks. By not exporting logs and collecting only the minimum amount of data (time stamp, attacking IP and recorded behavior) CrowdSec complies with the European GDPR and, more generally, respects data privacy.

A strong acceleration

CrowdSec’s team will grow to several dozen people within 18 months. Launched in December 2020, its solution has already been adopted in more than 90 countries, with a very rapid acceleration of the daily adoption rate. It has reported several hundred thousand IP addresses as dangerous. 

The company is currently in discussions with large customers, hosting companies, cloud makers and private companies, and will officially launch its commercial offers later this year, but will remain entirely free for its community. 

“Every year, states, banks, businesses and institutions spend billions of dollars to protect themselves. They are nevertheless hacked by groups with much lesser means. This cyberwar is asymmetrically favorable to hackers, who benefit from time, use stolen resources and mainly open source software, and face increasingly fragmented and permeable perimeters (Cloud drives, SaaS, VMs, containers, VPNs, etc.). Our goal is to rebalance the cybersecurity game by creating innovative, free and collaborative software in order to fight, together, hacking on a global scale.”

Philippe Humeau, CEO and co-founder, CrowdSec

“Digital has become a natural extension of our lives and we need to provide an answer to the societal problem posed by mass hacking. The techniques (or trends) developed over the last 30 years have clearly failed to address this problem. So it seems logical to us to propose a community-based approach, which has already proven effective in so many other areas, yet has not been applied to cybersecurity… until now.”

Maximilien Bacot, Partner and co-founder, Breega

In discussions with large groups, cloud makers and hosting companies, CrowdSec will officially launch its entreprise premium features in H2 2021. The user community will however always be able to enjoy the solution for free.

Security should be available to everyone. Let’s make it happen.