Australian-based company Kasada seeks to undermine the economics of malicious automation
By Rohan Pearce
Editor, CSO | FEB 23, 2020 8:24 PM PST
Could Kasada become Australia’s first cyber security ‘unicorn’? AustCyber CEO Michelle Price raised the possibility at a 2019 event marking the launch of NSW’s Cyber Innovation Node.
That the question could even be posed about a half-decade-old company might seem astonishing, but Kasada has managed to win clients among the ASX 100 and Forbes Global 2000, which is an impressive feat for any startup let alone one in the security space. However, it’s perhaps not surprising given Kasada’s founder — Sam Crowther’s idea of a good time when he was a teenager was doing work experience with the Defence Signals Directorate (now the Australian Signals Directorate) — as well as the particular niche the company has sought to fill: Fighting back against the plague of malicious bot-driven attacks on web applications.
As a teenager, Crowther worked with DSD for a number of years. When he finished high school he started a software engineering degree but the experience of dealing with the real-world challenges of information security made university less appealing.
Instead he ended up doing a year-long stint at Macquarie Bank. “I was brought on board to find problems and solve them in relation to security,” he explains. He left the Macquarie Group in 2015 to found Kasada. Like many of the best startup ideas, it was born out of “personal pain,” Crowther says. He was seeking to address a number of different problems that all had a common thread of automation. “So there are problems around account abuse, credit card abuse, and data scraping,” he says. “The thing that tied them all together was the fact that I could leverage a piece of code that I’d written to perform the tasks — and that was the only thing that made them viable.” The idea of combating the malicious use of automation is at the heart of Kasada and its bot detection and mitigation platform.
Going from the initial idea to Kasada involved a “lot of luck” Crowther says somewhat modestly. “I built a prototype and proved that it could work. From there, I looked at getting a little bit of angel money. I scraped some money together from some friends and family and then hired two guys to work with me to build the very first proper version.” “That took place over the course of about six to nine months,” he says. Kasada is “more or less a reverse proxy,” Crowther explains. “The idea is that customer routes traffic to their applications via us. We validate that it’s good and we send the good stuff back to them.”
