Meet the Westport man keeping hackers at bay from a Castlebar bunker

From a bunker in the iHub in Castlebar, Carrowholly man Matt Conlon is fighting back against hackers. His company is helping businesses stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated remote cyber attacks.

Cytidel, which stands for Cyber Threat Intelligence Delivered, was set up in 2021. Today its team is split between the Castlebar headquarters, where 19 people work, and a Dublin office that also focuses on the UK market.

The AI arms race

Conlon is blunt about how artificial intelligence has changed his industry. “AI has changed everything. Unfortunately, the attackers are now AI-enabled as well. Workflows are getting faster. The discovery of how to breach companies is getting faster.”

He puts numbers on the shift. “Five years ago, it took a threat actor an average of 32 days to weaponise an exploit and actually attack a company. Now it’s happening seven days before you even realise that the risk exists.”

The consequence, he argues, is that traditional methods no longer work. “Companies in general are just falling further behind. Attackers are getting faster, and so you now need to start moving at machine speed, and that’s fundamentally changing how security is traditionally run.” Cytidel’s own figures suggest cyber threats are increasing by 25 percent year on year.

Attacks without a click

Cytidel concentrates on a particular kind of threat: remote attacks that succeed without anyone ever clicking anything.

“If you look at the cyber breaches now, I think it’s about 33 percent of all cyber breaches are because of what’s called exploitation of a vulnerability,” Conlon explains. “It’s where a hacker can actually target your company and break in without you ever knowing, without you clicking anything, without needing credentials. So they can break in, steal data, deploy ransomware before you ever even realise that they’re there.”

His answer is a more predictive approach. “Understanding what are hackers targeting in real time, what are the technologies that they’re targeting, and then do you have that technology? Ultimately you need to start looking at it from a more intelligence-based approach, rather than here’s all my risks and let’s hope people don’t click phishing links. We’re doing active defence in real time.”

The company’s platform is built for business leaders and executives who must decide where to spend limited budgets. Its risk prioritisation engine analyses factors including threat intelligence, critical revenue streams and regulatory requirements. The aim is to ensure the right resources are applied to the right areas at the right time.

“Every day, over-stretched cyber security professionals are faced with thousands of new security vulnerabilities and little time or resources to fix them all,” Conlon has said. “We developed a platform that helps them to get clarity from the noise, significantly improving their ability to identify and fix the cyber risks posing the greatest threat to their revenue streams.”

Cytidel’s customers include blue-chip names such as An Post and Carne Group. The company says it enables their security teams to operate with over 95 percent enhanced efficiency, focused on vulnerabilities that could significantly affect crucial revenue streams or customer data.

From Westport to cyber security

Conlon is the son of Fintan and Wendy Conlon, who ran a furniture removals company based in Westport and operating all over Mayo. He graduated from Rice College in 2011 before studying at NUIG.

His professional background took in policing, network security, banking and intelligence, and he later worked at Accenture and Workhuman. Along with his co-founder, Conor Flannery, formerly of Integrity360 and Accenture, he spent a decade in cyber security across IT, finance and policing.

“I worked across threat intelligence, vulnerability management, security operations, and then incident response,” Conlon says. “So looking at what are hackers targeting, how are they breaching the banks, what technologies are they targeting, and then ultimately what are wegoing to fix?”

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Taking the punt

The two men made their move in the middle of Covid, leaving high-paying consultancy roles in Dublin to start a business in Castlebar. Conlon left his own job in October 2021.

“It was hard,” he recalls. “Especially you’re going from a high salary to effectively no salary, and you’re backing yourself.”

What helped, he says, was the New Frontiers programme. “That effectively gave me a starting leg up. So you get a small grant that helps you at least cover costs. You get that for six months. You get to test your idea. You get to go into the market.”

The Local Enterprise Office then provided further support, which allowed him to hire his first employees. “All of that is actually what got it off the ground,” he says. “All from the base in Castlebar.”

In 2022 Cytidel went through the New Frontiers programme in conjunction with Enterprise Ireland. In 2023 it was one of seven startups selected for the NDRC Accelerator programme. Those programmes, the company says, helped set the platform for its rapid growth and subsequent investment.

Growing Mayo tech community

Despite working on a global problem, Conlon is firmly rooted in Mayo, and he wants more people to know what the county offers.

“There’s so much support here in Mayo that people don’t necessarily realise is there,” he says. “Our offices are in the iHub, and the team provides so much support to early-stage companies. And as they scale, you’ve got companies that are operating from there and selling on an international and global basis.”

Emphasising the growing tech scene in Mayo, Conlon was a panel speaker at the WestxWest tech and culture conference in Castlebar on Friday.

He also points to the Local Enterprise Office, whose funding is increasingly going to tech firms. “It’s not just your traditional companies that would stay local. They are funding companies that are genuinely scaling internationally.”

For a Westport man who left a well-paid Dublin career in the middle of a pandemic, the bet appears to have paid off. From the iHub in Castlebar, Matt Conlon is now helping protect some of Ireland’s best-known organisations.