With Dephend, Alexis Musaelyan-Blackmon Goes on the Defensive Against Cyberattacks

All it takes is one. An email from what looks like your bank, asking you for account information. Or a message about a package delivery, confirming your address. Maybe it’s even a Nigerian prince, asking you to wire money in exchange for a royal investment opportunity. 

A momentary lapse in attention when you’re confronted with any of these phishing messages, and suddenly your money is gone or your identity is stolen. These types of cyberattacks can (and do) happen to anyone, even with failsafes in place. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced people online to work, socialize, learn, and more, became fertile ground for cybercriminals, who ransomed millions of dollars from businesses and individuals alike.  

But what if there were a better way to safeguard our valuable information than simply hoping we’re paying close enough attention to our email inboxes? What if our computers could continuously scan for unusual behavior, suspicious messages and accounts, data breaches, and unauthorized attempts to access our personal information? 

That’s Alexis Musaelyan-Blackmon’s vision for Dephend, a cybersecurity company powered by artificial intelligence. While the company (pronounced like “defend”) is still in the early stages of development, it’s already gotten buy-in, literally: Musaelyan-Blackmon raised startup capital from a first-round, friends-and-family funding effort. 

Plus, her idea and her passion earned the support of the judges at the Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. 

This year, organizers behind the Northeastern University initiative recognized 28 innovators with financial and entrepreneurial support. The winners received a portion of the organization’s largest total prize ever—$500,000—as well as companionship with a global network of women who are creating, running, and iterating on ventures across myriad disciplines and business sectors. To date, Women Who Empower has recognized 69 entrepreneurs with Innovator Awards over the course of three years, and has dispersed more than $820,000 to three cohorts of incisive, creative entrepreneurs.

“As more and more people are using apps and programs like Cash App or Facebook Marketplace, I know of friends and family who’ve had close calls with cyber attacks,” says Musaelyan-Blackmon, who is pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology and data science at Northeastern. “The increase in AI, as tech keeps advancing, means that cyber criminals can use it to their advantage to steal people’s data. Why shouldn’t we use it to protect them, too?” 

Dephend is a software program that will detect and—as the name suggests—defend against would-be cyberattacks in real time, by using an algorithm that continuously monitors an individual’s network traffic, Musaelyan-Blackmon says. As the program learns a user’s typical online habits, it will flag unusual behavior and activity. The longer someone uses the program, and the more information the software has about an individual’s normal behavior, the more accurately it can spot something out of the ordinary, Musaelyan-Blackmon says. 

“As a founder, I’m still doing research and developing it, but this will be a continuous process of always making it better,” she says. 

Though Musaelyan-Blackmon started at Northeastern on a pre-med track, she was also enrolled in a two-year scholarship program called the Virtual Institutes of Cybersecurity and Electromagnetic Spectrum Research and Employ, or VICEROY DECREE. Led by Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences and in partnership with the United States Department of Defense, the program recruits and trains the next generation of experts to combat cyber warfare. 

A cybersecurity pitch competition, hosted within the program, caught Musaelyan-Blackmon’s eye in particular. The event encouraged participants to develop an innovative idea related to cybersecurity, but Musaelyan-Blackmon saw even greater potential in the challenge. It was enough to make her change her major and focus on data science. 

“I just knew I wanted to take it to the next level,” she says. “I saw a social issue it could solve, and I wanted to emphasize in my venture how to uplift other women in tech and cybersecurity.” 

Through Dephend, Musaelyan-Blackmon has caught the attention of more than the Innovator Award judges, as well. 

John F. Griffin is part of the Defense Innovation Unit, a Department of Defense organization focused exclusively on fielding and scaling commercial technology across the U.S. military at commercial speeds. “I think her platform design is on the leading edge of innovation and technology,” he says. 

Griffin and Musaelyan-Blackmon met during a VICEROY showcase day, and at the time, Griffin worked at the National Security Innovation Network, a different branch within the Defense Department. The pair stayed in touch as Musaelyan-Blackmon honed her idea. 

“It is a testament to Alexis and this nation that we have citizens like her that are finding ways to use her talents and passions for the betterment of others and the security of this nation,” Griffin says. “Organizations (private and public) tasked with cybersecurity cannot think through every layer, every threat, every exploit. This is a widely complex, multi-layered, multi-domain challenge. Alexis has identified a vulnerability and an approach to protect networks. Her approach will add depth to the layers of protection modern organizations require to protect against security threats.”

And, he says, her pre-med background is a strength in the multifaceted nature of cybersecurity. 

“Cybersecurity requires more than code writers and computer scientists. It requires multi-discipline, creative, system thinkers,” Griffin says. “The human body itself is a complex system. Bringing a pre-med approach to cybersecurity does in fact bring creative solutions to the idea of security. And creativity and speed to solution is what is required in a highly competitive, quickly evolving competition against all levels of nefarious actors.”

For now, with the company less than a year old, Musaelyan-Blackmon is working to build and stress-test her prototype—and secure funding to bring Dephend to the next level. 

In the future, though, the founder envisions working closely with various corporate partners and government agencies to bring her technology onto computers around the world. But even if she can prevent just one person from falling prey to online scammers, the work will be worth it, she says.