BSE partners with John Chambers-backed Lucideus for cybersecurity solutions

The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on Tuesday said that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with cybersecurity startup Lucideus, which is backed by John Chambers’s venture capital firm JC2 Ventures.

In a joint statement, the stock exchange said that Lucideus will build and provide a Cyber Security Operations Center (SOC) as a service using its proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning-backed Security Assessment Framework for Enterprises (SAFE) module.

The solution will be in line with the Cyber Security and Cyber Resilience framework for Stock Brokers / Depository participants released by markets regulator the Securities and Exchange Board of India on 3 December 2018.

“With an evolving array of potential cyberattacks, it has become essential to have robust cybersecurity in place and safeguard the interests of our stock brokers. Even a minor cybersecurity breach could have massive economic and financial consequences,” S Ravi, chairman of BSE, said.

Lucideus in a statement said that its module will be able to provide the entire broker community a single-click subscription option, where they can use the solution via a BSE subsidiary, Marketplace Tech Infra Services.

It further added that it will provide an on-premise SAFE-in-a-box solution synced with Lucideus SAFE solution hosted at BSE Data Centres to provide real-time monitoring of all parameters covered in the SEBI guideline.

The on-premise box solution will host open-source tools along with the SAFE software that will aggregate insights from each terminal and sense the network security controls to send them along with the sys-logs to SAFE to be processed in real-time, it added.

In an earlier interview, Saket Modi, co-founder and chief executive of Lucideus had said that the company's SAFE platform can integrate with the existing technology stack of an enterprise to provide a real-time cyber risk assessment (a number between 0 and 5) at a macro level across the organisation, which can be broken down into micro-level scoring individually for each asset.

"It considers controls across people, process and technology," he had said.

In October 2018, Lucideus had raised $5 million (Rs 36 crore) from JC2 Ventures, the venture firm of former Cisco executive chairman John T Chambers.

In May 2017, Lucideus raised an undisclosed amount from a group of angel investors, inlcuding Amit Ranjan, chief architect of Digilocker, an initiative launched by the Indian government; Anurag Goel, CEO of Cactus Communication; and Govind Rajan, former CEO of Freecharge. Others included Jonathan Boutelle, former director of technology at LinkedIn SlideShare; Rajan Anandan, managing director at Google India; Rahul Chawla, managing director and head of global markets at Deutsche Bank; and Salil Donde, former executive vice-president at Nasdaq.

Other investors of the company, which provided the security framework for the BHIM app, include Anand Chandrasekaran, former chief product officer at e-tailer Snapdeal; Amit Chowdhary, director at private equity firm Motilal Oswal PE, and Sanjay Baweja, chief financial officer of renewable power solution provider Suzlon Energy.