A study in flexible innovation, and forming a new partnership based on trust.

We're often asked by early-stage companies how best to start a partnership with WWT. There are many ways: leveraging relationships, ecosystem extensions with larger companies, or filling a unique need for a client. The most intriguing partnerships often start with an idea or concern coming directly from the cyber industry. As the foundations of trust and innovation are fortified, we work together to try and address the concern raised. As we look towards Black Hat 2025, where a venerable buffet of innovation will be on display, we wanted to highlight an excellent example that started late last year.

Almost a year ago, the security team at WWT started becoming more concerned than usual about the current geo-political landscape from a cyber perspective and recognized a need to start looking for innovation options outside the U.S. for cyber intelligence and threat analysis. We came across a company out of France, Filigran (www.filigran.io), founded in 2022, that, from a start-up trajectory, checked all the boxes. It has strong leadership, solid funding and investment, over 100 team members, and a solid community following. After some due diligence, including excellent references from both the public and private sectors globally, we had an idea around a few ways to innovate in the cyber intelligence and threat landscape space. What was astounding, though, was after meeting with the CEO, how quickly he and his team took our ideas to heart. The team's willingness to collaborate and execute joint innovation was refreshing, even including roadmap changes to accommodate our ideas. The speed at which they took ideas/feedback and came back with new iterations of the problem statements we were looking to address was truly world-class, and created a level of early trust that allowed our joint teams to start examining how we could together address some very complex cyber issues that are plaguing today's community.

Now, nine months after this journey started, we are honored to announce WWT and Filigran are kicking off a strategic alliance focused on bringing actionable, threat-driven solutions to WWT's customers. Filigran delivers an open-source, modular suite that transforms threat intelligence into real-world defense. By integrating prioritized intel into breach and attack simulations and readiness assessments, security teams can elevate their posture and respond strategically, enabling AI to automate repetitive tasks, reducing alert fatigue and giving back time to analysts to focus on what truly matters.

WWT has an intense focus on providing industry-leading end-to-end solutions that leverage multivendor solutions and integration services to our customers. From an innovation perspective, our focus is on building and supporting solutions that address the rapidly changing threat landscape of today's world. Filigran has two flagship open-source solutions: OpenCTI, a threat intelligence platform built by practitioners to break data silos and make intelligence actionable across systems; and OpenBAS, an Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) platform that simulates real-world attack scenarios using threat intelligence and business risk context. Both are part of the Filigran XTM suite and reflect Filigran's commitment to open, collaborative cybersecurity, now trusted by over 6,000 organizations worldwide.

The Filigran partnership enables our teams to provide new ways to enable a more holistic advanced persistent threat (APT) search and remediation methodology based on the combination of OpenCTI and OpenBAS (breach and attack simulation) functions, while taking advantage of native integrations coupled with industry-standard, widely deployed agent technologies. Looking toward the future, WWT also plans to leverage Filigran and vibrant open-source community in WWT's Advanced Technology Center and Cyber Range.

Given the uncertainty of cyber intelligence-related sharing amidst the geo-political landscape, it's incredibly important to have a partner such as Filigran with extensive global expertise, open-sourced products and community, and with features/functionality designed from a practitioner's perspective. We look forward to seeing how this amazing new partnership will evolve and help impact our community in many positive ways as we look to address the complexities of our ever-changing threat landscape together, and share more about the work we are doing together as a part of this new partnership soon.