During his speech on February 18, 2021, the President of France presented his national acceleration strategy for cybersecurity. CrowdSec responded to this call and has been selected as part of the Grand Défi Cyber.
More and more cyber threats on a daily basis
2021 has been marked by an upsurge in ransomware attacks, which have increased fourfold in one year (ANSSI) and have spared no one: local authorities, healthcare institutions as well as companies in the industry sector. The trends observed over the last few years are confirmed every day. Moreover, the increase of the attack surface due to the generalization of remote working, are as many weaknesses exploited by cybercriminals.
In order to remedy this situation, the Government has taken the bull by the horns by deciding to support the development of disruptive technologies, via an initiative which scope aims to make our systems permanently resilient to cyber-attacks: the Grand Défi Cyber. This call for projects, launched by ANSSI and BPI France, is part of the 1€ billion funding plan unveiled by Emmanuel Macron, the French President, last February. The objective is to drastically strengthen the country’s cyber security by supporting the development of innovative solutions.
It is within the framework of this call for projects and more precisely with the ambition to offer protection to small structures against cybercrime that CrowdSec wished to position itself with a totally new approach.
CrowdSec winner of the Grand Défi Cyber
Given the number of attacks impacting small players (SMBs, associations, states, individuals, etc.), CrowdSec intends to help them with an innovative concept, based on the power of the crowd. With its software, CrowdSec blocks hacking attempts, in real time, at any level of the information system. The attacks listed are then shared with all its users. The system thus maps in real time the actors with malicious behavior on the Internet.
CrowdSec is particularly well suited to small organizations, offering a fully automated solution that allows them to fight cyber threats with a minimum of skills required and, above all, without changing internal practices.
Last May, CrowdSec was awarded a prize to develop during 12 months the essential bricks to the first version of its software, fully open source. In concrete terms, the start-up will benefit from a €650,000 grant, with which it plans to recruit five security experts to strengthen the current R&D team. CrowdSec’s objective, thanks to this grant, is to make its tool increasingly effective in detecting attacks, collaborative in sharing information between users, and to support the launch of its B2B features.
“CrowdSec brings to the cyber security market a brand new solution that uses the power of the crowd to protect us all together against cyber criminals. Being selected by the Grand Défi Cyber is a great recognition of our innovation as well as our expertise in cyber security.”
Laurent Soubrevilla, co-founder and COO of CrowdSec
Today, the software has been installed more than 18,000 times worldwide, and blocks more than 700,000 malicious IP addresses per quarter. The start-up doesn’t intend to stop there, and has stated its ambitions to reach one million installations of its software by the end of 2024. Also winner of the Black Unicorn award at Black Hat 2021, and of the RSA Innovation Award, CrowdSec will present in a few weeks new scenarios against ransomware attacks.
Our increasing exposure to digital technology offers so many opportunities to cyber criminals and our historical security models, relatively static, are now wisely complemented by a new approach, open source and free.
Congratulations to the 27 winners!
