Company Journey
Written by the company founders:
Who are we?
Cossack Labs operates at the frontier where digital system failure carries real-world consequences. High-consequence systems leave little room for error. A single weak component or missed compromise can trigger failures that are costly, disruptive, and, in some cases, impossible to undo.
For systems that underpin healthcare, finance, critical national infrastructure, and defence, the cost of failure is not theoretical. It can affect people, operations, and national resilience.
Cossack Labs designs, builds, and secures critical systems where the threat model includes not just your average cyber-criminals, but organised, well-resourced state actors. From power-grid control to mission-critical defence systems, Cossack Labs works in contexts where security decisions directly shape national stability, operational success, and human safety.
Cossack Labs combines technical depth with a philosophy shaped by experience in high-pressure environments:
- Security must evolve as systems, threats, and operating conditions change
- Shortcuts can accumulate into systemic risk
- Responsibility cannot be outsourced to frameworks, certifications, or post-incident explanations
This is the story of how our mindset formed: how a small group of engineers, frustrated by broken tools and misplaced compromises, grew into a company entrusted with protecting systems that cannot afford to fail.
Humble beginnings
Before Cossack Labs, our engineers and founders had been building software in banking, government, telecommunications, and healthcare—industries where privacy and security are critical, yet poor tooling and serious design flaws remained common in systems expected to be dependable.
As mathematician Richard Hamming once said, one of the most important questions in life is which important problems you choose to work on.
We chose to work on a problem we believed mattered: helping organisations address the root causes of security risk, rather than relying solely on solutions designed to mitigate individual threats or symptoms.
First realisations
As we developed our first cryptographic data-security products, we realised that the industry problems we had encountered were not simply isolated omissions. They were often the result of compromise between scarce resources, the way systems and organisations are built, and the way organisations deal with security risks.
Many security incidents have serious consequences, including financial loss and reputational damage, but do not immediately threaten an organisation’s ability to operate. If an organisation is willing to bear the outcomes of their suboptimal decisions, budgets are likely going to be spent on the safest choice, not the best outcome.
Over time, we found a substantial clusters of organisations who not only had substantially higher risk, but were not adequately served by standard solutions.
Most security innovation has focused on raising the industry’s floor—enhancing access control, identity management, monitoring, and incident response automation. But in an increasingly digitalised world, that is no longer sufficient. As systems become more interconnected and threat actors more capable, security must also push through the ceiling with stronger foundational controls, more consistent cryptography, and greater cross-system trust to keep pace with emerging risks.
In an increasingly interconnected world, good enough in one place can create risk in the other. One product’s failure could result in serious, far-reaching threats. On multiple occasions, the attack path to classified systems and shared infrastructure went through vulnerable smart meters, vulnerable dependencies in programming languages, or third-party services.
Our work on cryptographic data security tooling has taught us that we are most often sought out by customers who fully grasp the seriousness of their responsibility.
Our work on cryptographic and data-security tooling has shown us that we are most useful to customers who treat security as an enabler of operational capability, not only a compliance requirement.
Double down on hard security
We have had the opportunity to work with organisations that invest seriously in the security of their systems, customer data, and wider ecosystems. These include healthcare operators protecting sensitive records and financial institutions whose customers depend on the integrity and confidentiality of their data.
Over time, we expanded beyond our open-source cryptographic library and encrypted personally identifiable information (PII) exchange technology to build developer tools for data-security challenges in modern distributed applications.
Having realised that off-the-shelf delivery is not always optimal, we've started providing custom security solutions (with integration and support), and bespoke R&D capabilities for our clients.
In parallel, our internal security R&D, assessment and supervision team grew into a professional services department, serving customers with SSDLC oversight for critical system development.
We also contributed to community projects that could improve security practice beyond our own client work. Our security engineers have contributed to community standardisation and guidance projects, including OWASP MASVS, OWASP MSTG, and OWASP Cheat Sheet Series.
This expansion enabled Cossack Labs to address complex security challenges across blockchain, virtual data rooms, privacy-focused platforms, telecommunications, AI, and country-wide power grid operators. We protected the data of millions of users within their handheld devices by protecting their healthcare records as well as personal and financial data. We have also built security components for critical-infrastructure and defence sectors.
We found that many organisations recognise that SOC 2, ISO 27001, and similar frameworks are important foundations—but not complete security strategies on their own.
Over time, we found out that we're most effective in high-stakes environments, where security decisions are closely connected to operational continuity, financial loss, public safety, or national resilience.
In these environments, compromises must be explicit, proportionate, and made with a clear understanding of their consequences.
The stakes are growing, the world is changing
The world is changing, and the competition is escalating. As humanity depends more on digital infrastructure, it simultaneously becomes more fragile and exposed to risks. Digital infrastructure is both an enabler and a target in competition.
Over the past decade, cyber domain have become more integrated into organised crime, espionage, sabotage, and military strategy. Cybercrime of previous generations was more akin to technologically advanced financial fraud. Yet, as the years passed, increased digitalisation and interconnectedness led to unprecedented change in what constitutes a cyber incident.
Sandworm, a GRU cyber unit, set the standard for state-linked cyberwarfare with operations like Ukraine’s power grid attacks (2015–16), NotPetya (2017), and destructive campaigns during the current war.
They’re part of a wider APT ecosystem that includes nation-state teams like APT28, Lazarus, and APT41. Knowledge and techniques get shared, which lets espionage, sabotage, and financial malware cross-pollinate.
In modern conflicts, these capabilities are fused into military planning. In Ukraine, wipers and grid-sabotage malware often coincide with missile strikes. Cyber espionage is integrated in the larger intelligence gathering process. Cyber now acts as a battlefield force multiplier alongside intelligence, electronic warfare, and disinformation.
Incidents of the last decade all point at one important three uncomfortable root causes: misallocated resources, inefficient compromises, and good-enough decisions. These patterns are not unique to cybersecurity, but their consequences become more serious when essential systems depend on digital infrastructure.
As digital dependence grows, some risks cannot be addressed through temporary workarounds. Regulatory fines are a poor consolation when a security failure disrupts essential services such as electricity, communications, healthcare, or public administration.
Cybersecurity became a viable instrument of strategic competition. Commercial digital products, as well as defence and civilian systems, can become targets or dependencies within that competition.
In a world where strategic competition can turn into hybrid conflict, cyber defence widens the military’s capabilities. Attackers don’t care if your CISO holds a CISSP certification, or if you even have a CISO at all. Attackers often have a commanding officer, strategy, and orders, so the old hope that they’ll give up eventually doesn’t work anymore. Attackers will always try to find another way.
For some systems, state-linked threats are no longer a theoretical line item in a risk assessment.
The gap between moving fast and moving securely
Productivity begets innovation. What existed to deploy infrastructure in hyper-scale social networks yesterday, gets used to orchestrate power grid control today.
Innovation often moves faster than security assurance. As high-stakes environments adopt new technologies, security engineering must keep pace with their operational use.
The age of isolated, air-gapped, ideally polished secure systems is ending. Everything is interconnected and interdependent—and nothing was secure enough in the first place.
We’ve come to realise that only real-world conflict can truly test security measures’ and strategies’ soundness.
With changes around us, we’ve changed as well
Our quest to make a world a safer place—for everyone—only deepened since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We concentrated on security work supporting Ukraine’s power sector and critical infrastructure, then expanded into other systems essential to national resilience, including telecommunications, government services, military communications, battlespace-management platforms, and robotics.
Modern defence increasingly relies on software and connected technology across communications, situational awareness, logistics, autonomous systems, procurement, and operations. Those dependencies expand the attack surface: cyber operations can affect both military systems and civilian infrastructure that supports them.
The ethics of working in defence deserve serious consideration. For Cossack Labs, however, those questions have never been abstract. Many of us are from Ukraine, and our R&D offices remain there. We have seen how the security of communications, infrastructure, and operational systems is directly connected to civilian safety and national resilience. When Ukraine faced a full-scale invasion, our choice was clear: to apply our expertise to protect our people and support Ukraine.
What we chose to do
Today, Cossack Labs is a trusted partner for mission-critical systems across some of the world’s most demanding environments. Our work supports operations on the ground, in the air, at sea, and in cyberspace by building and protecting the digital infrastructure that all domains rely on.
Securing civilian critical infrastructure is no less important. We continue to support power-sector, government, and critical-infrastructure organisations in Ukraine, where corporate resilience and national defence can be closely connected.
We remain committed to our roots in the private sector, providing security technology and engineering expertise for high-risk environments in finance, blockchain, M&A, healthcare, manufacturing, and other sectors where a security failure can disrupt operations, expose sensitive data, or erode trust.
Our journey—tackling emerging challenges, advancing security engineering and research, and helping make a technology-rich future safer for everyone—continues.