Upstream: Cybersecurity designed for the connected car age

Upstream Security was founded by Yoav Levy (CEO) and Yonatan Appel (CTO), two seasoned security professionals with over 20 years of professional experience. They understood that the automotive market is undergoing a massive disruption, potentially greater than the one experienced by the mobile phone industry and that this disruption will require radically different security solutions in order to reach its potential – automotive cybersecurity solutions purpose-built for the automotive industry and its unique challenges.

The automotive industry is undergoing a transformation – decades old business models are rapidly changing and connectivity is quickly becoming an integral part of conducting business. Connected cars sit at the core of a new smart mobility ecosystem. Connectivity enables automotive vendors and service providers to monetize car data and achieve superior operational results. Consumer experience as well as operational efficiency can be improved and new business opportunities can be imagined. At the same time, however, connectivity exposes vehicles to a wide array of risks that never existed before – cyber-threats as well as misuse. 

OEM car makers and service providers alike have been challenged to date with identifying and locating cyber threats targeting their smart mobility services and connected vehicles. In order to secure the smart mobility ecosystem – vehicles, infrastructure and services – from attack, fraud or misuse, a new breed of security solutions is required, one that is purpose built for the unique challenges of the automotive industry and to the specific attributes of an individual connected car.

In a similar fashion to the transformation undergone by cybersecurity solutions in enterprise IT, automotive security solutions need to be designed for the age of “connected cars everywhere” and move from an endpoint (in-vehicle agent based) security model to a centralized cloud-based agent-less one. Cyber solutions must be able to understand and distill the massive amounts of unique data created by fleets.

Upstream helps corporations mitigate connectivity risks and ensure the safety and security of smart mobility solutions protecting connected and autonomous vehicles, SAE levels 0-5, on the roads today or twenty years from now, from remote cyber attacks generated over the public internet or private mobile APN as well as from fleet-wide attacks targeting multiple vehicles at the same time.

Upstream C4 - Centralized Connected Car Cybersecurity

Upstream C4 is the first cloud-based solution for securing connected and autonomous vehicle fleets for both OEMs and aftermarket fleets. Upstream’s Automotive Cybersecurity solution leverages big data analytics and machine learning to protect fleets from cyber-attacks and policy violations, such as fraud and misuse, and provides insights on vehicle and driver behavior.

Upstream unlocks insights from the troves of data already collected by vehicle fleets such as driver and vehicle behavior, vehicle utilization, maintenance, driving routes and more. The result is end to end visibility of fleet security and policy health which ultimately help assure and improve fleet and business performance.

Vehicle, Fleet and Automotive Cloud

Upstream’s real-time Automotive Cybersecurity solution for connected cars offers protection from cyber-threats, including:

• Remote cyber attacks
• Individual vehicle or Fleet-wide hacking
• Data center breaches
• Denial of Service attacks
• Ransomware
• Theft of vehicle’s intellectual property

The individual two-way communications between each connected vehicle in the fleet and the server are precisely what make connected fleets vulnerable to cyber attacks. The only effective way to ensure protection of the data in these communications is by applying security at the data center – the demarcation point between the operational network (OT) and information network (IT). 

Upstream’s C4 Platform sits in this demarcation point, offering a powerful combination of IPS/IDS (Intrusion Prevention System/Intrusion Detection System) for automotive protocols coupled with machine learning algorithms tuned for fleet and driver behaviors. The result is the first purpose built security solution capable of detecting, interpreting and alerting of any threats to connected vehicles

Vehicle and fleet insights

Upstream Insights offers fleet-wide visibility by means of analytics tools providing actionable insights

• Customized reports
• Identifying trends
• Vehicle and driver behavior profiling and scoring
• Tools for improving prediction
• Event investigation tools

Connected vehicles generate data from many different vehicle sensors, resulting in troves of information. Buried within this information are valuable performance indicators, such as driver and vehicle behavior, vehicle utilization, maintenance, driving routes and much more. Fleet stakeholders could benefit from uncovering these valuable insights into fleet health, discover meaningful connections, trends and patterns which could improve driver experience as well as vehicle and fleet quality and reliability. Leveraging this data that is already being collected and stored, could serve in building competitive advantages and creating new revenue streams.

With Upstream’s Automotive Cybersecurity platform, fleets benefit from discovering the golden nuggets of data hidden within their collected information, gaining visibility of fleet health and analytics tools, revealing key insights and ultimately improving company performance. With Upstream, fleets can easily investigate incidents and uncover root causes, as well as discovering blind spots and problematic areas of which they were not aware.

Knowing the man behind the success

Yoav Levy, Co-Founder & CEO

Yoav is leading Upstream's strategic direction, culture and business execution, over 17 years of experience with multi-national high-tech companies and start-ups. He brings rich leadership experience in management, marketing and business development of IT and security products spanning over a dozen years of experience in category leading vendors Check Point, Juniper Networks and Broadcom. Yoav is an avid kite boarder and surfer.

“We are a team of cybersecurity and data professionals with a clear focus on our customers’ success – the result is the most comprehensive protection of the mobility service infrastructure, connected vehicles and more importantly the people inside them.”