Published
Sep 28, 2024

Deep tech start-up SECTA5 doubles the speed of cybersecurity threat analysis and response

Singapore deep tech start-up SECTA5 has launched its flagship product

Cartographer

– a revolutionary platform powered by Artificial Intelligence aimed at helping companies speed up their cybersecurity threat analysis, prioritisation and subsequent response in a single platform.

Compared to conventional manual methods of cyber risk management - also known as cyber risk triage - where teams must manually trawl through tens of thousands of disclosed vulnerabilities and assess them individually, ranking them in importance for their companies to address, Cartographer can do it at twice the speed with greater precision.

This solution will greatly help companies which are increasingly at risk of cyber attacks to prioritise their cyber security efforts and resources – saving time and money while lowering risk to business operations and information systems.

Last year, there was almost a four-fold surge of disclosed vulnerabilities – weak points where a company’s information security system can be breached or compromised – 26,447 reports when compared to 2013.

As reported by American enterprise cyber risk & security platform Qualys, this huge spike in software vulnerabilities shows that the conventional gold-standard practice is becoming increasingly ineffective against the backdrop of growing workloads and a shortage of seasoned security professionals.

To tackle these issues, SECTA5 was founded by two alumni from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), and their partners, who possess strong expertise in ethical hacking such as red teaming and attack simulations against large organisations.

Photo by Pixabay

With support from the venture building team from NTUitive, the innovation and enterprise company of NTU Singapore, SECTA5 successfully automated the cyber risk analysis and prioritisation processes with the help of Machine Learning and Generative AI and has successfully tested it in real-life trials.

Clients that trialled Cartographer were able to speed up their cyber risk triage while being able to have continuous threat and exposure management (CTEM), which blends business context, threat intelligence, automation, and prioritisation into a cohesive system.

Mr Sky Seah, Co-founder of SECTA5, said their flagship product gives organisations a powerful and easy tool to navigate the complexities of modern cybersecurity challenges, especially for Chief Information Officers and Chief Information Security Officers who have to make key decisions in a fast-paced environment.

"Cartographer enables organisations to swiftly identify the most critical cyber risks and prioritize their remediation efforts accordingly. In the analogy of a ship, it is no longer just about patching whatever leaks that spring up in the hull, but to systemically prioritise the patching of major leaks and reinforcement of areas where it will have the largest risk of leaks before the leak happens,”

explained Mr Seah.
“It is like proactively reinforcing the defences of a castle. By centralising vulnerability management processes around Cartographer, businesses can enhance their cybersecurity defences autonomously, strengthen their overall infrastructure and prepare countermeasures before an enemy breach.”

Cartographer VM Features

  • Curation of vulnerability pipelines - Choose data that is relevant for the organisation, ingest outputs from industry-leading vulnerability scanners, penetration test reports, agent-based sensors, and more
  • Auto-triage with context - Rationalise vulnerability data in consideration of what is critical for specific businesses, including environment and regulatory obligations
  • Enrichment with threat intelligence - Incorporate industry-leading threat intelligence feeds when triaging each vulnerability to validate if there is indeed actual impact to an organisation
  • Prioritisation at scale - Automate time-consuming triage across multiple platforms so that security professionals can prioritise higher-value strategic work

Enterprises Must Prioritise To Optimise Limited Resources

According to Gartner®:

"Continuous threat exposure management is a pragmatic and effective systemic approach to continuously refine priorities and walk the tightrope between two modern security realities. Organisations can’t fix everything, nor can they be completely sure what vulnerability remediation they can safely postpone." 1

“At the core of Cartographer's development was a simple question: How can we make exposure and risk-based vulnerability management more effective and inherently smarter? The answer is our Software-as-a-Service platform that not only automates triage but does so with a precise understanding of each organisation's environment, unique risk profile and real-life threat intelligence. We aim to help IT teams zoom in on the cyber risks that really matter, and mitigate them faster and more effectively,” added Mr Seah.

1 Gartner Article, How to Manage Cybersecurity Threats, Not Episodes, By Kasey Panetta, August 21, 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

About SECTA5

SECTA5 is a cybersecurity company built by former cyber attackers for today’s cyber defenders. Our mission is to empower organisations by predicting and neutralising security breaches with our cutting-edge, autonomous security orchestration platform.

Founded by a group of former attackers and defenders, SECTA5 was founded to harness the collective experience of simulating and defending against attacks end-to-end, and present a unique solution to secure organisations.