Aorato

Aorato was an Israeli cybersecurity firm established in 2012 by co-founders Idan Plotnik (CEO), Michael Dolinsky (VP of R&D), and Ohad Plotnik (VP of Professional Services). The founding team brought extensive experience in cybersecurity, with roots in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and a history of working as Microsoft security subcontractors through a previous company, Foreity. Their expertise in enterprise security, particularly with Microsoft technologies, laid the groundwork for Aorato's core focus.

The company secured a total of $11 million in funding across two rounds. A seed round of $1 million in December 2012 from Glilot Capital Partners was followed by a significant $10 million Series B round in January 2014. This later round attracted prominent investors including Accel Partners, Innovation Endeavors (a venture capital firm funded by Eric Schmidt), and notable security entrepreneurs Mickey Boodaei and Rakesh Loonkar.

Aorato's primary business was providing advanced security for corporate networks by focusing on a critical, yet often overlooked, component: Microsoft's Active Directory (AD). The company developed the Directory Services Application Firewall (DAF), a product designed to protect enterprises from internal and external threats that target credentials and lateral movement within a network. The DAF operated by monitoring network traffic to and from AD servers, using machine learning to establish a baseline of normal behavior for every user and device.

The core of Aorato's technology was the "Organizational Security Graph," a dynamic model mapping all interactions between entities on the network. By continuously comparing real-time activity against this graph, the system could detect anomalies and suspicious behaviors—such as unusual access patterns or authentication requests—that indicated a potential attack. This approach allowed security teams to identify threats that traditional firewalls might miss. In November 2014, recognizing the strategic value of this technology for its own hybrid cloud security vision, Microsoft acquired Aorato for an estimated $200 million. Aorato's technology was subsequently integrated into Microsoft's portfolio, forming the basis for what became Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) and later Azure Advanced Threat Protection (Azure ATP).

Keywords: Aorato, Directory Services Application Firewall, DAF, Organizational Security Graph, Active Directory security, identity protection, behavioral analysis, user entity behavior analytics, UEBA, Microsoft acquisition, Advanced Threat Analytics, Azure ATP, Idan Plotnik, Michael Dolinsky, Ohad Plotnik, enterprise security, network security, threat detection, anomaly detection, machine learning cybersecurity, Glilot Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Innovation Endeavors