Veteran of IBM's Deep Blue launches AI-based cybersecurity company

Four new malware strains are created every second, and the banking industry is almost 300 times as likely to get attacked by malware as other types of businesses, according to Nayeem Islam, CEO of Blue Hexagon.

That’s why his deep-learning cybersecurity startup, which has been in stealth mode for a year and a half and officially launched Tuesday, is making financial services one of the primary industries it serves. The company has received $31 million in funding from the venture capital firms Benchmark and Altimeter Capital. Heffernan Insurance is its first public customer.

Nayeem Islam, CEO of Blue Hexagon.

Blue Hexagon uses self-learning technology to catch network threats, Islam said. So instead of an engineer having to provide a lot of information to the software about what to look for, it teaches itself what to look for from high-level guidelines and a diverse set of samples.

“If you tried to make a system recognize dogs, but you just fed it examples of poodles and that’s all it knew a dog was and an Alsatian came along, it wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” Islam said. “Similarly, we have to feed a diverse set of samples to the software through which it can generalize and find variants.”

The software can detect threats in less than a second, and it can predict and detect new variants, according to Islam. It is said to have identified many banking Trojans that are used to steal credentials from users.

“These malware strains tend to mutate quite a bit and are incredibly hard for traditional techniques to detect,” Islam said. “Deep learning is very good at finding them. It allows us to keep up with the bad guys.”

Before forming Blue Hexagon, Islam was the head of research and development at Qualcomm, where he led efforts to use deep learning for image and speech recognition. Before that, he was part of the supercomputing team at IBM that built the machine that eventually became Deep Blue.

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