XM Cyber Announces Acquisition of Confluera, Adding Run-Time Protection on Cloud workloads to Extend CNAPP Capabilities

XM Cyber, the leader in hybrid cloud security, announced the acquisition of Confluera, a pioneer in next-generation cyber attack detection and response for the cloud. XM Cyber now offers a comprehensive CNAPP (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform) solution using its unique attack path modeling to prioritize and assess real risk to the critical assets in your cloud environment.

Together with Confluera, XM Cyber’s Continuous Exposure Management platform will provide all aspects of cloud security, from identifying and fixing risk regarding cloud identities (CIEM), identifying vulnerabilities and the detection and response of actual cyber attacks in real time (CWPP), and best practice and compliance management (CSPM).

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The rapid rise in sophisticated attacks across hybrid cloud environments requires organizations to equip themselves with a dual strategy that combines advanced preventative capabilities with active detection and response. Classic EDRs that were originally meant for endpoint protection aren’t equipped to deal with the runtime protection of cloud infrastructures. Detection in the cloud requires the next-generation capabilities of CxDR (Cloud eXtended Detection and Response), which leverages visibility from different vantage points and accurately combines them to identify multi-stage attacks propagating across distributed cloud environments.

The XM Cyber solution enables organizations to see their on-prem and cloud environments just like an attacker would and identify weaknesses that can potentially be exploited on attack paths to critical assets. With the addition of Confluera, organizations will now have the ability to continuously monitor their cloud environments in real-time to see if they are actually being exploited and effectively block the attacker’s progress before any damage is caused.

“We work so well together because we’re both looking at the environment through attack path modeling,” said Boaz Gorodissky, co-founder and CTO of XM Cyber. “For example, XM Cyber shows our customers how an attacker could take advantage of a cloud secret found in the on-prem environment, move into the cloud, escalate privileges of an EC2, and compromise S3 buckets with sensitive information through a chain of events. Now with Confluera, we will detect if this attack path is actually happening in real time, alert our customers and help them stop the attack before it reaches the S3 buckets.”

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Confluera co-founder and CTO Abhijit Ghosh, who will be leading the development and integration of the CxDR with XM Cyber as VP CxDR, added: “We are very excited to join forces with XM Cyber to deliver a comprehensive cloud security platform. The technologies complement one another. They cover the prevention and detection aspects of security, with a common attack path modeling-based approach of unifying diverse visibility to identify multi-stage attacks. We are thrilled about leveraging this synergy to address our shared mission of protecting hybrid cloud environments from advanced attacks.” Confluera co-founder Niloy Mukherjee further added that “the offensive cybersecurity knowledge of XM Cyber’s research team will greatly enrich Confluera’s engine to discover and intercept any form of security threat possible across any cloud plane.”

The acquisition of Confluera comes less than a year after XM Cyber acquired Cyber Observer to expand its CSPM capabilities.

“Integrating Confluera into our offering just made so much sense. We compared their detection capabilities on workloads with a prominent CWPP solution and were able to detect several attacks that the other CWPP solutions did not. And perhaps just as significantly, it did not create unnecessary noise for the security teams,” said Noam Erez, co-founder and CEO of XM Cyber. “Today, security teams are overwhelmed with an overwhelming amount of alerts and multiple security tools that they can’t keep track of. They are demanding the consolidation of solutions that can accurately and holistically analyze risk and pinpoint high priority exposures to be remediated efficiently. Confluera aligns perfectly with this core value that we deliver within our suite of services and is a natural fit for us.”

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