Highlights:

  • According to the organization, the Lightspin team has substantial technical knowledge in SaaS security products, product development, and cloud security.
  • The platform of the startup not only finds vulnerabilities but also explains them.

Lightspin Technologies Ltd. is a startup that assists businesses in identifying and comprehending vulnerabilities in their cloud infrastructure, and Cisco Systems Inc. is buying the company.

Without providing any financial information, Cisco announced the deal recently. Previously, investors gave Lightspin USD 20 million.

Senior Vice President of product incubations at Cisco, Vijoy Pandey, wrote in a blog, “The Lightspin team has extensive technical expertise in cloud security, product development, and SaaS security products. The team’s experience supporting DevOps and DevSecOps with context and tooling will accelerate our ability to deliver the solutions and support needed to prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities.”

Based in Tel Aviv, the same-named cloud security platform is offered by Lightspin. The platform can automatically check cloud environments for risky configuration options, vulnerable code, and other issues. The platform catalogs the issues it discovers in a centralized dashboard and ranks them according to importance.

For many cybersecurity tools, businesses must set up software called on an agent in their cloud environments. Deploying new software can be a difficult and time-consuming process for administrators. Lightspin’s lack of an agent requirement makes it easier to deploy.

The platform of the startup does more than identify vulnerabilities—it also explains them. The platform displays the related attack path next to each security flaw it identifies. An attack path is a graph illustrating the possible breach techniques and the order in which hackers might use them to compromise a specific system.

Lightspin offers tools for identifying malware with its vulnerability detection features. Falco, an open-source tool for identifying breach indicators, and Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service from Amazon Web Services Inc., are used to detect malicious programs.

Lightspin will be included in Cisco’s ET and amp;I (emerging technologies and incubation) business unit. The team oversees investigating the latest product ideas in markets, including cybersecurity.

Panoptica, one of the software tools created by Cisco’s ET and amp;I business as part of its effort, may benefit from the technology. The latter tool can identify vulnerabilities in cloud environments used by enterprises and rank them according to severity. Also, it can detect possibly malicious behavior.

Since February, Cisco has acquired two cybersecurity startups, including Lightspin. It previously purchased the firewall developer Valtix Inc. The startup’s firewall can identify and stop dangerous network traffic in cloud environments while dynamically modifying its settings.

A key element of Cisco’s growth plan is cybersecurity. The end-to-end security division of the company reported USD 943 million in revenue for the most recent quarter, up 7% from a year earlier. Moreover, Cisco had a 7% growth in total revenue for the quarter, reaching USD 13.59 billion, higher than the USD 13.43 billion experts predicted.