IoT security startup Cybeats announced that its IoT monitoring and security app, deemed IoT Radar, is now available on the Palo Alto Networks Application Framework. This news comes about a month after the startup raised $3 million in a seed round.

Cybeats is a Toronto-based company that was founded in 2016. The startup was co-founded by three former Israeli IT Infosec employees: Dmitry Raidman, now Cybeats CEO, Peter Pinsker, now director of embedded systems, and Vlad Kharbash, now vice president of R&D.

The company’s security product orchestrates security, monitoring, and firmware lifecycle management of IoT devices for smart buildings, enterprise, medical, and critical infrastructure. In a blog post introducing the company, Raidman wrote that Cybeats is “taking an entirely new approach to device security,” which is to secure, protect, and fix IoT devices.

This requires Cybeats to work directly with device manufacturers as one of its offered services. The startup alerts device stakeholders to any vulnerability from third-party software by keeping an updated record vulnerabilities coming from third-party software libraries.

The second phase, protect, is initiated by Cybeats “micro agents” that can be placed on the device before its ships. "The Cybeats microagent for firmware is analogous to the [human] body's immune system," wrote Raidman in an email to SDxCentral. "It detects threats, neutralizes them, and keeps the device healthy while alerting you if any additional intervention is required." In addition, Cybeats uses these agents to collect cyber forensics data.

The final phase, fix, is done by Cybets updating the devices with any firmware changes. This is rather than manufacturers distributing the firmware where hackers can also access it, and without relying on customers to implement the updates.

The Palo Alto Networks Application Framework is a cloud-based infrastructure that collects data from its security operating platform and connects this data with a number of cloud-based security applications. The framework hosts apps from over 30 organizations.

According to Raidman, the framework "showcases disruptive technologies" and the value of being included is "time to market plus the exposure of Palo Alto Networks and their reach."

Cybeats’ IoT Radar app provides internal defense, monitoring, and lifecycle management directly to IoT devices. The app uses the Cybeats’ micro agent firmware to collect a company’s IoT monitoring data from the device and correlate that with Palo Alto Networks network data. This increases the visibility into a potential or existing attack, creates better coverage across the customer’s network, and provides more accurate detection of threats.

Customers receive impact analysis reports of each threat, which is augmented by the threat intel data that Cybeats collects from its agents.

In addition, the application can analyze network connections, provide insights into both known and unknown IoT threats, and visualize IoT devices on the network to illustrate which devices have vulnerabilities. It can also share insights on connections made from devices to rogue networks, and it provides visibility into transferred data on the network.