Written in Partnership with Amir Bakian
Alarming reports of new cyber attacks and data breaches happen regularly, costing companies an average of $9.8 million dollars per breach. What’s more alarming? CloudCover has the technology to detect and block those types of attacks. And to go another step further, the confidence in that technology is so great that CloudCover subscribers have data insurance.
CloudCover is the brilliant amalgamation of CTO and Chief Scientist Robert Demopoulos’ genius and the financial and technical acumen of CEO Stephen Cardot. “Our mission was to solve the underlying and remaining problem that everybody else has been a little afraid to tackle. Hacking and hackers present a comprehensive and compelling problem with changing methods.” Cardot explains. “Our holistic cybersecurity solution not only identifies and neutralizes attacks in the blink of an eye, but we embed cyber insurance directly into the network, incorporating analytics, metrics, and risk-aware controls.”
The impetus of CloudCover
The co-founders, or you might say, co-collaborators, approached the challenge of cybersecurity from two distinct perspectives, allowing them to create the perfect formula for an effective and revolutionary solution.
Demopoulos had nearly a 40-year career in the security industry. He faced significant challenges as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at NASA and General Electric. Cardot shares, “He had a huge budget, massive dollars; anything he wanted, he bought. But he was a significant target. He constantly fought off the hacking, with compromise after compromise, every day. He couldn’t keep everybody out. He said, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do something different.’
Frustrated by the limitations, he moved on. He assembled a team of mathematical geniuses, and over the next three years, together with AI, they developed multiple advanced algorithms and laid the impressive groundwork for a regenerative AI system capable of rapid threat identification and neutralization.
Cardot explains, “His AI system, quite frankly, had every malware signature in the world dialed into it when it was launched. Ever since then, it’s been learning and is able to see behavioral statistics and analysis of network traffic to the point where it can actually identify threat vectors literally in microseconds and act on them. Stop them, neutralize them, prevent them. This is the genesis of the technology platform that Robert Demopolis built.” Cardot was so impressed he bought and merged it into the CloudCover® organization.
Cardot’s background is equally impressive. In the 1990s, he was an art/creative director. He saw the visual and marketing potential of the internet at its inception and had an active part in introducing entities like Target, Pillsbury, and General Mills to the concept of websites. He even had a hand in building the world’s first websites.
Later, he ventured into online banking and quite remarkably led the creation of the first online bank in 1995-1996 and introduced online banking to Barnett Bank and Riggs Bank. He notes working on a project for Riggs Bank, literally known as ‘The Bank of the Presidents’ in Washington DC, “We basically found ourselves several stories under the ground with printout sheets of every single account and their PINS, and we had to actually hand-input all that information, human coding into the banking system. It took months. It was a very massive project.”
As they say, the best innovations come out of pain points, and that was no different for Cardot and CloudCover. “It prompted this realization of the need for cyber insurance protection for data in the Information Age.” He consulted an IP lawyer, who said it couldn’t be patented. Cardot patented the idea in 2000.
CloudCover today
Despite facing the challenges of a home base in Minneapolis versus Palo Alto or Boston, Cardot and Demopoulos’ CloudCover has persisted. They have an 85% sales close rate on those who see their platform in action.
Director John Riordan shares, “We let our machine learn the network of an interested corporation over approximately two to three days, no more. Once we learn their network’s topology, we can see and record the breach attempts. We’ll show interested parties what our software has picked up and the breach events. They are always surprised at what we find and say, ‘Okay, I want to buy this.’ As soon as they subscribe, we’ll turn our software on full-security blocking mode and boom, they’re protected.”
Cyber attacks and breaches have become commonplace but even more damaging. CloudCover’s one-of-a-kind technology, led by Stephen Cardot and Robert Demopoulos, is crushing the problem. With the company’s regenerative AI system, boasting advanced algorithms, it excels at swift threat identification and neutralization. Compounded with CloudCover’s cyber insurance offering—they have created a groundbreaking approach that everyone who knows about it wants.
Visit CloudCover and learn more about its network-centric cybersecurity and cyber insurance.
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