CrowdSec believes using an IDS is the key to stopping hackers 

Modern organizations are facing cyber threats on all sides. Whether it’s DDoS attacks, brute force hackers or VOIP tempering, organizations need to be prepared to protect their internal systems. 

While there are many solutions available to do this, Intrusion Detection System’s (IDS) provide a framework for identifying any malicious attempts to break into an enterprise environment. 

One such provider, CrowdSec, announced it has raised €14 million ($14.8 million) as part of a Series A funding round led by Supernova Invest. 

CrowdSec’s flagship solution includes an open source IDS and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that provides a real-time blocklist curated by tens of thousands of machines, and IP addresses. 

The organization claims this provides enterprises with the largest real-time database of cyber criminal controlled IP addresses, which enables them to protect themselves against a high volume of zombie machines.   

The time to address automated attacks is now  

The announcement comes as bot attacks are on the rise. Research shows that websites are attacked 172 times per day, the equivalent of eight attacks per minute. 

Cybercriminals will commonly compromise users’ devices so they can use them to launch malicious attacks against target organizations. 

“CrowdSec can analyze and deal with 50+ different types of behaviors seen in logs. This ranges from credit card stuffing to port or web scans, credential brute force, VOIP tempering, comments trolling in CMS, e-commerce scalping, L7 DDoS, etc.,” said CrowdSec CEO and co-founder, Philippe Humeau. 

“If it can be logged, CrowdSec can deal with it. Once a problem has been dealt with locally, if the smear heavier from the same IP address is seen somewhere else in our user community, the IP address behind it starts building a reputation against itself and eventually ends up in the blacklist, further reinforcing the protection for everyone. It’s like the Waze of firewalls,” Humeau said. 

The IDPS Market 

CrowdSec falls most neatly into the intrusion detect and prevention systems market, expected to grow from $4.57 billion in 2020 to reach $9.04 billion by 2028. Currently, 100,000 users use the solution. 

The organization’s IPS solution is competing against a range of other providers including Trend Micro, with TippingPoint, a Next Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS) designed to protect infrastructure and data in real-time from known and unknown vulnerabilities with threat prioritization. 

Trend Micro recently announced raising over $500 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in the fourth quarter of 2021. 

Another competitor is FireEye, which offers an IPS alongside its FireEye Network Security solution that can detect known and unknown malware threats.

FireEye’s Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX) technology automatically validates signature-based threats to identify legitimate security incidents and reduce false positive alerts. In June 2021, FireEye announced it intended to sell its products business for $1.2 billion to Symphony Technology, a private-equity firm. 

Humeau claims that CrowdSec differentiates itself from competitors based on its ability to detect unknown threats. 

“Our competition mainly harvests their signals through honeypots, so they are more likely to catch “CVE farmers” – people industrializing the exploitation of known vulnerabilities. Hence they detect the “background noise” (like Greynoise) but not attacks sent in a targeted manner against real servers by cybercriminals willing to make real profit,” Humeau said.