The prevalence of recent cyber-attacks has proven that anyone is susceptible to a security breach. University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) startup Lastline is changing the cybersecurity landscape, with its ability to analyze and protect against advanced malware at an unprecedented speed and volume.
Cyberattacks employ a variety of techniques to avoid detection from basic anti-virus software and other first-generation sandboxes, and these techniques often outsmart conventional cybersecurity software. Lastline is specifically engineered to catch these types of evasive malware, with its unique full-system emulation that provides the deepest level of visibility into unknown malware behavior and is the hardest for evasive malware to circumvent. Lastline can be integrated with existing security software, and it also protects a business’ entire enterprise, including email and web security. It can be deployed across different operating systems and can also be hosted or deployed on-premise.
Lastline was founded in 2010 by Engin Kirda from Northeastern University, Christopher Kruegel, and Giovanni Vigna, both from UCSB. Some of the ideas that inspired Lastline products were developed at UCSB and published in top academic conferences, when Kruegel and Vigna were professors in the Computer Science department. This academic background was part of the “DNA” of Lastline, whose mantra was “innovate to protect.”
Lastline was acquired by VMware in 2020.