Illusive Networks Completes Its 100th Software Release

On February 13th, we broke out the hats and balloons (read: hummus and beer) to celebrate Illusive’s 100th software sprint. For 100 releases now, we’ve been helping our customers—hundreds of organizations across industries—revolutionize their ability to stop advanced cyberattackers.

“What’s in the release?” I asked. I got back a long list of very specific details which, without context, are not that interesting. But in an agile-based process, the routine releases represent the many incremental advances that roll up into major achievements.

Steps Make Journeys

Here are a just few of our releases over the years that marked major milestones for us, but which also raised the bar generally for threat detection and response technologies:

• Release 3 – January 2015 – Following beta testing with our first customers, Illusive rolled out the first-ever endpoint-based deception solution, designed for early attacker detection, no matter where an attacker first established a foothold.
• Release 27 – February 2016 – Attacker View marked the first time defenders could see the true network from an attacker’s perspective and track the location of attackers in relation to “crown jewel” systems and high-privilege credentials
• Release 44 – October 2016 – In the wake of the first major attacks on SWIFT messaging systems, we announced the first deception-based solution to prevent wire transfer fraud.
• Release 54 – March 2017 – Deception Management System (DMS) broke the scale barrier for deception technologies; With DMS on the back end, Illusive could now automatically design and deploy tailored deceptions to hundreds of thousands of endpoints.
• Release 83 – April 2018 – Attack Surface Manager was released, a “first” in the discovery and removal of hidden credentials and connections to preempt malicious lateral movement.
• Release 95 – November 2018 – Incident responders can function far more efficiently with our Forensics Timeline,  an interactive, searchable, sortable repository of all the forensic detail collected for each incident.

We are incredibly proud of our accomplishments to date, and continue to focus our efforts on product innovations to better serve our customers now and in the future. Illusive recently announced enhanced forensics and new Decoy capabilities within the Attack Intelligence System, and we have more exciting things planned in the coming months.

Thanks to our customers

“We wouldn’t have gotten too far out of the gate without our customers,” said Nir Greenberg, our director of customer success and one of Illusive’s early employees. “A truly effective product can’t be built in an Ivory Tower. We know really well how attackers operate, but our customers are the ones who know what makes a technology truly functional for them. About half of what’s contained in Release 100 are feature requests. As we’ve matured, our customers have the biggest voice in the future direction of our product.”

Simply. Awesome.

What does Illusive turning 100 mean to me as a founder and CEO?  Of course it’s a time warp. The founding of the company seems, on the one hand, like it happened yesterday. On the other hand, it’s been an eternity of rich experience packed into a few short years.

First of all, I am grateful to all the customers, investors, and board members who have shown confidence in our vision and helped us bring it to life.

But of course I am also so proud of us—the people who make up Illusive—for delivering cutting-edge threat defense. The market is tired of talking year after year about how big and bad the attackers are. They’re tired of having cyber risk be a limiting factor. We don’t just stop attackers, we deliver business confidence.

Last summer, reflecting on our rapid growth and recognizing the need for a philosophy to keep us aligned, we adopted an internal commitment to be “Simply. Awesome.”  This means that we strive for the best in everything we do, at all levels, in all tasks. Because it all adds up. It’s the cumulative impact that matters.

On to the next 100!

Matan Kubovsky, long-time leader of our research and development teams put it like this: “Simply. Awesome. reflects our belief that what seems to be a complex problem—how to stop advanced attackers—can actually be boiled down to simple things if you take a fresh approach. As we move on to the next 100 releases, our R&D team says ‘keep it agile, keep it Illusive.’ It has been an amazing and transformational experience, from a few lines of code in one small room to a whole platform of products with millions of lines of code that provide a complete threat defense solution. We’re all excited for the next 100 releases.”