Zero Networks, the pioneer in MFA-based segmentation, today announced $20.3 million in Series A financing led by Venrock along with F2 Venture Capital, PICO Venture Partners as well as various angel investors. Founded by security veteran Benny Lakunishok, Zero Networks makes segmentation the easiest thing enterprises do in cyber security. To date, the company has raised $25 million.
Winner of the 2020 Gartner Cool Vendor award, Zero Networks “drastically reduces threats such as malware and ransomware, as well as more advanced attackers. This essentially stops the spread of the infection before it starts,” said Rob Smith, former analyst at Gartner. Ransomware continues to plague business. In 2021, 37 percent of all businesses and organizations were hit by ransomware. Worse, recovering from a ransomware attack cost businesses $1.85 million on average in 2021*.
“Solutions today fail to protect enterprises from lateral movement and ransomware because they are expensive and cumbersome to deploy,” said Benny Lakunishok, Founder and CEO of Zero Networks. “Zero Networks’ MFA-based approach simplifies one of the hardest problems in cyber security regardless of company size. In the past, vendors took the old school approach requiring manually specifying IP permissions—an unscalable approach. Consequently, the problem of lateral movement remained unsolved, giving attackers the upper hand and giving birth to today’s massive ransomware industry.”
Zero Networks has a patented unique and first of its kind approach to make segmentation. With Zero Networks, enterprises can stop almost any type of attack from spreading in any network by enabling MFA for every asset and device. Zero Networks automatically takes every asset and restricts network access to exactly what is needed–applying protection for client, server, home, office, on-premises or in the cloud. Our pioneering “just-in-time privileged access” approach segments any network without the headaches associated with agents or hair pinning. Designed for usability, Zero Networks deploys in minutes to automate segmentation for normal usage while applying MFA-based restrictions against privileged protocols.
Zero Networks found a new paradigm to upend the notion that micro segmentation can be fast, easy, effective and deployable by anyone to get military grade security. Zero Networks:
- Applies just-in-time privileged access with self-service MFA to apply security for abnormal activity, privileged users or anytime extreme security is required.
- Brings strong protection without impacting day-to-day employee experience by automating segmentation across non risky protocols to ensure standard employees routines and interactions experience zero disruption.
- Deploys without an agent as a virtual appliance that is not inline, enforcing policy via remote controller for firewalls to eliminate agent management and usability headaches.
“Finally, a network segmentation and control solution that can scale without adding additional costs,” said Malcolm Harkins, former CISO of Intel.
“Large security vendors have been busy adding pointless functionality to stop ransomware, failing to fulfill their core purpose—stopping lateral movement,” said Todd Graham, vice president at Venrock. “Organizations need one solution to stop ransomware and lateral movement versus a patchwork of questionable technologies du jour. Zero Networks provides a scalable, effective innovation CISOs have been hoping to see for decades.”
