DIU Invests in CounterCraft’s Cyberthreat Deception Platform

The Defense Innovation Unit is financing the development of a cybersecurity platform made by European startup CounterCraft. 

Under a prototype other transaction agreement, CounterCraft is designing a platform that can gather threat intelligence and use deception tactics to better understand how the opponent is attacking, Nextgov reported Thursday.

“The capability to elicit high-grade threat intel from cyber attackers is a game-changer. U.S. cyber operators repeated use of the CounterCraft capability provides validation of our vision and security engineering and is a source of great pride for our company,” CounterCraft CEO David Barroso said in a press release.

CounterCraft said its platform uses advanced deception environments to detect unauthorized adversarial activity. 

Barroso said he is impressed by how fast his company's technology was adopted by one of the world's top cybersecurity powers. 

The DIU is a Department of Defense organization that was launched in 2015 to help the military take advantage of emerging commercial technologies.

The development of the cyber deception platform began before the discovery of the SolarWinds hack that compromised the networks of multiple federal agencies.  

CounterCraft co-founder Dan Brett told Nextgov that the company's platform was built to force adversaries into making mistakes such as the one that led to the discovery of the SolarWinds hack.

“Because we've got these threat actors not in a real IT system, they’re in something that was deliberately deployed to pick up bad people, we can change that environment without messing up our real systems," Brett told Nextgov.