Egypt’s Buguard raises $500,000 Seed spherical to develop its staff

Egypt-based cybersecurity startup Buguard has raised a $500,000 Seed funding spherical, led by A15, the MENA enterprise capital agency that backs early-stage startups within the area, with participation from angel traders. 

The capital which is  Buguard’s first exterior funding since its launch in 2021, can be used to develop it’s staff, specializing in product, gross sales, and channel partnerships.

Youssef Mohamed, Founder and Chief Know-how Officer of Buguard, stated:“We’re delighted to announce our fundraise, and I thank A15 for its nice help. The world of darkish net cyber threats could be very actual, dynamic and rising. Any firm could be a sufferer and one should be ready. Our staff at Buguard is hand-picked and consists of among the world’s main safety researchers and engineers, coupled with a subscription-based, SaaS product – Darkish Atlas – that goes broader and deeper than present various options.

“We have already got a world base with purchasers from all around the world, however our speedy technique is to develop even stronger within the GCC. We sit up for increasing into Saudi Arabia throughout 2023 and utilizing our proceeds to assist fulfil our vital development potential.”

Buguard affords offensive safety providers together with penetration testing and vulnerability evaluation, phishing simulation, compromise evaluation, risk intelligence and purple teaming.

Because it commenced operations, Buguard has served a lot of Egypt’s main companies of their respective fields together with Paymob, Fawry, EFG-Hermes, Halan, Fortunate, Thndr, MaxAB, Eksab, Rabbit Mart, amongst others.

The corporate has developed a world shopper base spanning Saudi Arabia, the USA, France, Australia, Japan, the UK, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. 

The corporate has additionally introduced the launch of Darkish Atlas, its new SaaS product for darkish net monitoring and account takeover prevention. 

The darkish net is a hidden a part of the web typically utilized by cybercriminals to distribute malware which might result in capturing of non-public credentials corresponding to usernames, passwords, and fee card particulars. The affect of such assaults will be vital, inflicting monetary loss, repute harm, and lack of stakeholder belief. In its Value of a Knowledge Breach Report, IBM Safety reported the common price of a knowledge breach in 2022 was $4.35 million, an all-time excessive. The identical report highlighted that use of stolen or compromised credentials stays the most typical explanation for a knowledge breach. Stolen or compromised credentials have been the first assault vector in 19% of breaches within the 2022 examine and the highest assault vector within the 2021 examine, having precipitated 20% of breaches. 

Buguard has a number of aggressive differentiators. For knowledge leak monitoring, most merchandise concentrate on public knowledge breaches, which implies publicly uncovered databases. Darkish Atlas is far broader and deeper than various options. It screens compromised units for info stealer malware corresponding to Redline, Raccoon, and Vidar, that are the basis causes of most materials knowledge breach incidents and pose a severe risk because the stealer malware exfiltrates saved credentials from the victims’ browsers and has the related URL inside which the credentials can be utilized. 

It additionally screens darkish net marketplaces, hacking boards, underground channels, and personal clouds to determine and assist neutralize breaches throughout totally different venues. Buguard lately managed to determine and utilise a coding flaw that allowed it to lock out operators of the Mars Stealer malware, a data-stealing malware as a service which permits cybercriminals to hire entry to the infrastructure to launch their very own assaults, from their very own servers and launch their victims.

Additionally, Darkish Atlas add-on options provide purchasers further safety by monitoring third-party/distributors threats panorama and C-level private emails. It additionally proactively places purchasers a step forward of assault impersonators and phishing assaults, by discovering all the same/impersonation domains for purchasers’ manufacturers.

Karim Beshara, A15 Common Associate, commented:“We now have been very impressed by the area experience exhibited in Buguard’s safety researchers and engineers and are very excited to accomplice with Youssef and Buguard’s best-in-class staff. Threats posed by ever evolving cybercriminal ways are a severe risk to companies, each massive and small. It’s changing into more and more essential to take proactive measures to guard in opposition to these threats. Buguard does simply that via its safety providers and Darkish Atlas.”     

Buguard was based by Youssef Mohamed in 2021. Its consultancy staff contains extremely expert safety researchers and senior offensive safety engineers. The staff is famend for locating vital safety vulnerabilities in nearly each massive tech large corresponding to Yahoo, PayPal, Twitter, Snapchat, Mail.Ru, Epic Video games, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Dell, Adobe, AT&T, Vodafone, and the US Division of Defence.

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