Seculert Gets $5.35 Million Investment For Cloud-Based Botnet Detection Service

Seculert has raised a $5.35 million round of funding today led by Norwest Venture Partners for the Israeli company’s next generation advanced threat detection service.

The company’s software-as-a-service detects back doors in your network, discovering malware attacks that have previously gone undetected.

As much as the cloud is for developing cool apps, it is also a place for botnets. The botnet culture thrives upon our daily immersion into the online world. The botnets are mostly networks of personal computers overtaken by malicious software that is controlled by a master program. The master directs the slaves to act on its behalf, in the industry terminology. People will click on a link in Twitter, on the Web or in email. The malware will then attack and take control.

It could not be a better time to be in this criminal world. There are just too many endpoints out there. By an endpoint I mean that tablet in your purse, the smartphone you look at all day and the laptop back at the house where you do your work.

People work at home. People have lots of devices. And we all spend far more time online. For a lot of us, IT is in some distant place.

That means we need new ways to protect the network. Other new startups like Bromium are cropping up — it sees a future with security built deep into the devices with micro-virtualization capabilities that isolates malware without the user even knowing there was an attack.

Seculert takes a different approach, actually monitoring botnet traffic. It will look for your IP addresses in the botnet itself. If it finds one, it knows you are under attack. If it finds relevant data, it uploads the information to the Seculert Cloud. You are then given access to that information through a secure Web-based dashboard, as well as through email alerts, and RESTful APIs.

For additional advanced persistent threat detection, you can upload your log files, such as Blue Coat, Squid or others, to Seculert Cloud. It will then analyze your logs with Hadoop to identify advanced threats to your organization.

Seculert will use the funding to open an office in the Bay Area and add more people to develop its technology. The company received a seed round in 2010 for an undisclosed amount.