LightCyber

LightCyber was an Israeli cybersecurity firm founded in 2011 by Michael Mumcuoglu and Giora Engel, both of whom brought significant experience from their time in elite intelligence units of the Israel Defense Forces. Gonen Fink, another veteran of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit and an early employee at Check Point, later joined as CEO, bringing extensive entrepreneurial and leadership experience from the security industry. The founders' backgrounds in military intelligence provided a deep understanding of adversarial tactics, which became the foundation for the company's approach to cybersecurity.

The company developed a behavioral attack detection platform, known as LightCyber Magna, designed to identify active security breaches inside a corporate network that had already bypassed traditional perimeter defenses. Its business model centered on selling this platform to enterprises, particularly in sectors like finance, healthcare, and technology, that were looking to detect sophisticated threats and insider attacks. The Magna platform's key differentiator was its ability to combine network traffic analysis with agentless endpoint investigation. It worked by passively monitoring internal network traffic to model the typical behavior of users and devices. When it detected anomalies—such as unusual file access or network protocols—it would then collect host-level data to verify a breach, providing security teams with detailed, actionable alerts.

The LightCyber Magna platform provided visibility into attacker activities like internal reconnaissance and lateral movement, which are often missed by conventional security tools. It used machine learning to build behavioral models and identify deviations, minimizing false positives and allowing security analysts to focus on genuine threats. The system was designed to be integrated with existing security infrastructure like firewalls and Active Directory for rapid response, such as isolating a compromised endpoint. In February 2017, after raising over $32 million in funding, LightCyber was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for approximately $105 million in cash. The acquisition integrated LightCyber's behavioral analytics technology into Palo Alto Networks' Next-Generation Security Platform, eventually forming a core component of what became the Cortex XDR platform.

Keywords: behavioral attack detection, network detection and response (NDR), insider threat detection, machine learning cybersecurity, breach detection, Palo Alto Networks, Gonen Fink, Michael Mumcuoglu, Giora Engel, Magna platform, endpoint analysis, lateral movement detection, attack lifecycle, cyber threat intelligence, network traffic analysis, automated threat prevention, user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), anomaly detection, cybersecurity acquisition, Cortex XDR