Cyberattack Pushback: NanoVMs Designing Defensively to Counter Threats

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

Data that exists is data that’s vulnerable.

In 2021, relying on outdated technology to handle new and often extreme cybersecurity threats in a shifting landscape isn’t a comprehensive or viable strategy. With relentless and mounting cyberattacks part of daily reality, cutting-edge protection against them has never been needed more to maintain infrastructure safety, privacy, and maintain functioning supply chains.

Infrastructure software’s purpose is to improve the efficiency and performance of a company/entity’s operations and technology platform. Google and Facebook’s data breaches and bugs definitively show how extremely large and powerful companies are also susceptible to attacks. The larger a company, the more security risk they take on. Breaches are also very costly for corporations to absorb. Given that, it’s not surprising the cybersecurity market is projected to reach $111 billion by 2025 from $20 million in 2020.

When it comes to cybersecurity, focusing on defense alone without incorporating prevention at the earliest developmental stages addresses only a part of the problem, treating the symptom instead of addressing and correcting the cause.

Risk assessment has to incorporate the whole picture in order to be effective. Otherwise, theft, breach, ransomware, and other malicious attacks are most likely imminent. Sally Jelen writes in “Cyber Counterintelligence: When Defense Alone is no Longer Sufficient:

“Defensive cyber counterintelligence are actions taken to identify and deflect adversaries before they attack. The purpose of defensive CCI is to protect the organization against vulnerabilities and internal and external threats. In addition to traditional security measures such as firewalls, IDS’s, anti-virus solutions and encryption, defensive CCI consists of penetration testing, vulnerability assessment and management, threat intelligence, threat hunting and more.” 

With many people working from home in response to Covid-19 restrictions and remotely accessing servers, this multilocational traffic and increased data exchange across networks means more risk. When access is no longer compartmentalized to a given finite physical space, it expands attackers’ range, opportunities, and options to strike. One pathway is third-party vendors hackers working for Russia used this route when they attacked utilities in the US, reaching the control rooms and causing blackouts.

Rising to meet the change and challenge is NanoVMs, stepping in and stepping up cybersecurity at a foundational level, partially through strategic subtraction in their design scheme. Founded in 2015, the company received $2.4 million in funding, gaining recognition in their 5 target markets: healthcare, finance, government, energy, and telecom. Along with $170K from the Department of Energy, they’ve received a multi-award contract from the US Air Force, and have run trials with Amgen. Nanos recently launched NanosC2.

Using unikernels, defined as “simply an application that has been boiled down to a small, secure, light-weight virtual machine,” their patented operating system “shrinks applications into small virtual machines” to fortify security at a foundational level, creating standalones that work together with other standalones. The application has no operating system, users or shell. As a single application, the defense is in the construction. No other applications can run on it, shutting down an attacker’s access point. Their approach is prevention through omission, a formidable design defense strategy that shuts down hackers by leaving out the tools they use to infiltrate.

NanoVMs accomplishes multiple objectives within one operating system. It increases speed while also enhancing performance and reducing costs, making protection and systemic improvement one and the same.

“Security is a real burning issue when it comes to the infrastructure,” says CEO and founder Ian Eyberg. What we’re really doing is kind of upgrading the software infrastructure for the modern-day company.” 

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.