For decades, businesses have been aware of how vulnerable they are to cybercrime. They have spent billions of dollars on enterprise security solutions to protect trillions of dollars worth of data, while the average consumer is completely content with an outdated antivirus program.
In the golden age of malware, that won’t work anymore.
CUJO, an El Segundo-based consumer security startup, believes they have a solution.
“If you think of your own home, you have 10, 15, 20 devices connected to the internet, and none of them have any form of security installed other than your laptop or PC perhaps,” said CEO Einaras von Gravrock. “What CUJO does is it shows you everything that's connected on your network, and it starts monitoring behaviors. If it sees something suspicious, be it a phishing link or someone from Ukraine wanting to look into your laptop's camera, we will lock it and alert you.”
Founded in 2015 by veteran entrepreneurs von Gravrock and Yuri Frayman, the company’s smart firewall utilizes machine learning in order to learn the patterns of users and identify potential threats.
Having previously done business together at Frayman’s enterprise security company ZENEDGE, the founders realized that consumers had no version of enterprise security available to them.
“We looked at it from the enterprise perspective first, but it dawned on us that homes have zero security. Literally nothing,” said von Gravrock. “In the enterprise security world there are these great, robust systems, and we've applied some of the same principles and kind of shrank it for the average home user to buy.”
By collecting and analyzing a device’s patterns, CUJO is able to identify actions it can deem as unsafe and alert the user through the CUJO app.
“We take snippets of information from every packet that enters your network. Using the packet headers, we build specific profiles for what your devices should normally do, and what devices in general normally do. If we see something odd, our algorithms will look into it and be able to evaluate whether it’s suspicious or not. If it is, our algorithm will block that behavior.”
Because the startup is one of the first of its kind, von Gravrock said he admits that much of his job is making the average person aware of what they are vulnerable to, something that can be mistaken for fear-mongering. But, the evidence is in the data. In 2015, Californians lost nearly $200 million to cyber crime, more than double the next state on the list.
“In the olden days of, well, a few years ago, antivirus companies would release signatures or rules — basically patches — to your computer,” said von Gravrock. “They would say 'hey, we know that this particular virus does this particular thing to these particular files on your PC. Here's a patch, let's make sure that virus can't do what it's supposed to do.' That doesn't work today because most of these IOT hacks you hear about evolve every few hours.
Individual units sell for $99, and owners pay $9 a month after that (though the first six months are covered). CUJO owners are given detailed instructions on how to set-up their device and can call CUJO customer support to help at any time. In all, the process takes about 15 minutes.
After the installation is complete, users are able to see every device that has connected to their network. Alerts are sent through push notifications in real time.
“An average user of ours gets 3-4 alerts a week. Sometimes it's going to be a phishing link that they clicked on that we stopped, often times it will be a malvertisement,” said von Gravrock “I don't want to sound like I'm scare-mongering, but one thing that our customers find out is that once they connect CUJO, they see regular alerts, and we're pretty good at explaining why we blocked something and where it came from.”
With offices in Europe, Brazil and LA, the company’s roster sits at 43 employees, with nine people working out of the company’s headquarters in El Segundo. Aside from a seed round in 2015, the founders haven’t taken any investor capital to date, and plan to continue bootstrapping for now.
“We're at the stage where it's super early, and we're building a leader on the consumer side for home internet security,” he said. “That's a roundabout way of saying we’re trying to postpone institutional as far as we can so we could keep as much of the company as possible.”
Images via CUJO
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