Enigma Networks is developing software that protects from escalating AI-backed security threats

“Bad guys don’t hack anymore. They log right in” and do their damage quietly, says Bob Moul, who’s run half a dozen Philly-area software companies.

Artificial intelligence software, using powerful processors to rapidly sort images, video, and data and to improve results with each new query, isn’t just helping government agencies, corporations, and university researchers improve their work. It’s also driving a rise in cybercrime, Moul says.

“The bad guys use AI to evade detection and make their way to the highest-value assets quickly,” he said.

Old network perimeter security techniques — “what we used to call moats and castles” — and the simpler security programs, called “agents,” that companies drop into devices they want to protect have become less effective and often don’t work with machines on factory floors, Moul said.

AI-era attackers gain access quietly and move across a target company’s systems, stealing useful information where they are least likely to get caught, instead of striking fast at well-defended central systems, according to Barry Porozni, chief technology officer at OceanFirst Bank’s Spring Garden Capital Group, who has acted as an adviser to Moul’s latest endeavor.

As an investor, Moul sees opportunity. He’s taking the wraps off an 18-month “stealth project” he’s been working on since selling his previous start-up, Circonus, to Sweden-based Apica last year.

The new venture is Enigma Networks, a cybersecurity software developer based in Exton, Chester County. Moul partnered with Mark Viglione, who with a small team of engineers developed Enigma after working as a cybersecurity engineer at QVC and at Ambler tax-software maker Vertex, where John Viglione, his father, worked for 24 years. The elder Viglione is an Enigma adviser.

Enigma offers what the founders call “zero-trust for internal networks” software architecture — ZTNX, the latest in a string of “zero-trust” security applications that have become popular since hackers stole millions of Americans’ credit card information in the Equifax breach of 2017, and the federal government ordered networks to beef up internal security.

It is designed not only to track activity but to log all movement and patterns of behavior across a company’s systems, using sensors that deploy across a network rather than agents added on each device.

“We are agent-less,” Moul said. “You drop our sensor into your network, it gets a mirrored copy of your network traffic” to identify and stop problem operators.

The platform also has the benefit of helping software users track their own computing systems — a surprising challenge for companies that have built networks from many vendors over decades.

Enigma “combines discovery, visibility, segmentation, and detection in a single, agent-less platform” that deploys quickly, according to an early user, David Wallace, chief technology of YPrime, a private equity-based maker of software for clinical trials with 300 employees, based in Malvern.

“It’s like flipping on the floodlights, so you can see everything that was hidden, see where traffic is flowing,” he added, in a testimonial Wallace supplied to Enigma.

Couldn’t that create a network blueprint that can be stolen by cybercriminals?

“It is not vulnerable because it does not communicate back to the network,” Moul said. “It gets sent to our platform, hosted at Google Cloud. We use AI to learn your environment, apply rule sets to segment your network. It learns patterns that find breaches much faster, and it cuts down on false alerts, which is huge. If the sensor program gets interrupted, it will automatically reboot.”

Enigma’s early targets include companies in regulated industries — insurance, finance, healthcare — as well as manufacturing, especially medical equipment.

It’s early going. Moul said Enigma has run a single cohort of pilot-testers and is planning to run a second in August.

Backers include Philadelphia-based Osage Partners, which has invested in more than 70 companies since its founding in the late 2000s, and United Effects Ventures. It is a newly organized suburban Philadelphia private investment firm set up by Borzou “Bo” Motlagh, a former software director at Vertex, and Frank Shultz, founder of Infinite Blue, an Audubon-based computing-outage warning and management company acquired by Massachusetts-based Everbridge last year.

“Enigma AI is targeting [industries] that need better security to combat a new age of AI-enabled threats and unforeseen anomalies,” Motlagh and Shultz said in a statement. “You need new tools to defend against new threats.”

Moul is well known in Philly tech-business circles as a leader in software founders’ groups. Beyond Circonus, he helped run Cloudamize (now part of France-based ATOS); Artisan Mobile (acquired by Seattle-based affiliate marketer Tune in 2015); cloud-based corporate-software integrator Boomi (sold for $4 billion to Silicon Valley venture capitalists in 2021 and employs over 2,500 from its Conshohocken headquarters); and college-software pioneer SCT (now part of Ellucian).

Moul taught himself BASIC computer language on a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer in high school in the 1970s. He says Enigma may be his last start-up.