Source: cyprus-mail
‘We invest in top satellite systems, encrypted communications and camouflage, yet the smartphone can still expose locations and operational plans’
What began as a privacy app for people worried about spyware secretly listening on them or stealing their personal data from their phones, has grown into something far more ambitious.
Five years on, Malloc, led by co-founder and CEO Maria Terzi, is moving across enterprise, government and defence, developing mobile security technology designed to protect users operating in some of the most sensitive and restricted environments.
The company’s evolution reflects a wider shift in cybersecurity. Smartphones are no longer simply personal devices. For journalists, executives, government personnel, political figures and defence users, they can also become a route into location data, communications, personal, confidential and operational information. For Terzi, however, Malloc’s expansion is not a departure from its original mission. If anything, she believes the company is still far from what it can ultimately achieve. From a privacy app to something much bigger.
Looking back at how Malloc has evolved, Terzi said, “To be honest, nothing changed, in fact, Malloc is not even near to what it can become.”
The company was created with a mission “to help people stay safe and private online, to protect them from spyware and hacking attempts, and to help them regain their privacy”, she said. It started with privacy-conscious users who wanted greater control over their data, including people in restrained and censored environments, high-risk individuals, investigative journalists, politicians and governmental personnel.
Malloc has since expanded into protecting sensitive, defence personnel and communication infrastructure, pushing the product into accomodating national security and military needs. “To accommodate their needs and the demanding, sometimes very restricted environments they operate in, Malloc had to evolve from a consumer app to an enterprise and governmental-level app,” Terzi said.
A task that also required the expansion across geographical barriers and overcoming technology restrictions to ensure the protection remained “as seamless as possible”.
AI without giving up privacy
The company is also trying to solve one of the tensions at the heart of modern AI. AI systems need more data to become more powerful. Collecting users data on a remote cloud though contains privacy risks. Malloc avoids these risks, by keeping most of the training and inferance of AI algorithms on the device itself.
For Terzi, that inevitably involves trade-offs. “There is always a trade-off between privacy, usability, and speed, but Malloc balances them to maintain high precision and seamless experience without compromising security,” she said. When it comes to secure and private AI detection, the company trains global base models in the cloud and then adapts them directly on the user’s device using local data.
It then uses Federated Learning to feed improvements back to the main model “all without ever transmitting personal user data from the user’s device”.
Teaching AI to recognise the unfamiliar
That on-device approach is central to DAEMON-AI, a collaborative initiative between Malloc and The Cyprus Institute, supported by the Research and Innovation Foundation (RIF) and co-funded by the European Union under the Thalia 2021–2027 programme. The project is developing lightweight, on-device AI intended to strengthen Malloc’s protection capabilities.
Its first pillar is anomaly detection, which learns normal user habits so it can identify abnormal behaviour in real time, such as unexpected outbound data bursts. The second pillar is AI payload classification. Malloc classifies encrypted outgoing traffic by monitoring the size of packets and their frequency, to distinguish routine browsing from more sensitive activity, such as location sharing or screen recording.
The insights from both systems are then fed back into Malloc’s core infrastructure “to sharpen detection against sophisticated spyware and prevent data leaks”, Terzi explained.
When cybersecurity moves into defence
Malloc’s next stage is increasingly tied to defence. It’s the only entity form Cyprus that has joined the EU’s EUDIS defence accelerator, becoming one of 20 companies selected from 499 applicants Europe-wide.
For Terzi, entering defence is not simply about opening another market. It raises the standard at which the technology itself has to operate. “As my co-founder and CTO Liza Charalambous says, we have zero room for error. To lead globally, Malloc must perform flawlessly in mission-critical environments”.
The issue is particularly important because, in Terzi’s view, mobile devices remain “defence’s weakest link”. “Security and military invest in top satellite systems, encrypted communications, decoys and camouflage to become invincible, yet a smartphone in a pocket can expose locations and operational plans, compromising national security,” she said.
Through EUDIS, Malloc will be able to validate its dual-use technology against military requirements.
The accelerator also provides a €120,000 non-dilutive voucher and access to European networks, with Terzi seeking to “build long-term partnerships with EU Ministries of Defence”.
Cybersecurity also has an unusual problem when it comes to acknowledging success. The moment Malloc blocks a suspicious attempt, the motive, depth and source of the attack might be unknown, while the user feels that nothing happens.
Terzi acknowledged that “success often looks like complete silence”. “With zero-day exploits and sophisticated spyware, blocking a threat happens long before we know its exact identity”. Because its system relies on behavioural detection, it can stop unauthorised data leaks as they occur, even without a known signature.
In the meantime, the company focuses on what can be measured immediately, including blocked data flows, and realtime risk mitigation.
Ultimately, proving value “is about keeping your devices protected and your communications private”, Terzi said. “We are preventing the leak before any damage is done”.