Israeli cybersecurity startup GuardiCore Ltd. may get a bit more attention after landing a hefty $60 million round of funding that brings its total capital raised to $110 million.

New investor Qumra Capital led the Series C round, with participation from new investors DTCP, Partech and ClalTech, and existing investors Battery Ventures, 83North, TPG Growth and Greenfield Partners.

Guardicore’s ability to attract such a significant amount of funds boils down to the capabilities of its “deception-based” Centra security platform, which is an alternative to traditional firewalls that’s designed to protect both enterprise data centers and cloud infrastructure.

Centra deceives attackers by rerouting suspicious network connections to a secure sandbox, from where they’re allowed to execute their attacks as normal without being able to do any damage. The idea is that by allowing this, information technology teams can learn more about each individual threat to their systems and what the attackers actually intend to do, in order to build more effective defenses.

GuardiCore said its technology can detect everything from bots to skilled human hackers attempting to bypass a system’s security controls manually.

Guardicore has also built a free to use, open-source “self-propagating” testing tool called Infection Monkey that IT teams can use to find weakness in their on-premises and cloud-based data centers. Infection Monkey works by scanning a company’s network for open ports and fingerprinting machines using multiple network protocols.

Once it finds a vulnerability in the network, it attacks it using a variety of methods, including password guessing, by drawing on data on the systems it has breached, such as user credentials. Infection Monkey then tries to infect as many machines in the system as possible, in order to highlight how vulnerable they are.

“Any organization has critical IT assets that need to be secured,” said Pavel Gurvich, Guardicore’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “Our distributed, software-defined segmentation solution is the simplest way to secure these assets whether they reside in the cloud or on premises. The days of being chained to legacy firewalls are over.”

Guardicore said it plans to use the money to expand its sales, marketing and customer service teams.

Photo: typographyimages/Pixabay