Phantom Cyber a Low-Key Startup in a World of Many 'Shiny Objects' - Wall Street Journal (blog)

At any cybersecurity conference these days, the show floor is packed with companies pitching expensive gadgets to block hackers, detect breaches or track the resulting damage.

Too often, though, these products don't talk to each other. Worse, they spew a deluge of security alerts that lull users into complacency.

If the latest anti-hacker technologies are new shiny objects, "maybe they're not quite as shiny as we want them to be," says Jay Leek, the chief information security office for Blackstone Group LP, the private-equity firm in New York.

Such thinking led Mr. Leek to his firm's latest investment in a cybersecurity startup, which he describes as, "not some new shiny object." Instead, Phantom Cyber Corp. offers software to help other security tools work better together and automatically respond to breaches.

For instance, if a sensor made by FireEye Inc. detects malware, Phantom Cyber might ship the malicious code to analysis software by iSight Partners Inc. to determine who is behind the attack. Meantime, it may run a query on software made by Tanium Inc. to identify infected computers that should be quarantined.

Phantom Cyber, based in Palo Alto, Calif., says it can work with most major makers of cybersecurity gear.

It's complicated and nerdy, but it's an unusual tack among modern security companies, which often play up all the ways they fight hackers. Mr. Leek says he hopes companies like Phantom could help firms like Blackstone that now build their own tools to get their other, expensive, products to work together.

Rolling your own security software creates problems, Mr. Leek said, when an in-house programmer decamps for another job. "If those individuals leave, you've got to unravel a lot of spaghetti," he said.

Another alternative would be hiring more security engineers to monitor alerts around the clock. But executives, including Mr. Leek, claim they couldn't find enough qualified security analysts to fill each of those openings, even if it were practical.

On Monday, Blackstone announced that it led a $6.5 million investment in Phantom Cyber, which has now raised $9.2 million to date. The company has about 10 employees, 10 beta customers and hopes to make its first products generally available later this year, founder Oliver Friedrichs said.

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