Fintech News

Interview with RiskIQ COO and President on Executive Guardian, the service helping billionaires protect themselves online

TechBullion sat down with RiskIQ COO and President Dan Schoenbaum to discuss how the top 1 percent is protecting themselves in the digital age.  

In 3-5 sentences, what is RiskIQ?

Dan: RiskIQ is a cybersecurity company that helps organizations defend their attack surface beyond their firewall. Our technology crawls billions of web pages a day across web, mobile, and social channels, downloading their content to add to our repository of internet data, which is among the largest in the world. We sell “access” to this data whereby our customers can visualize, and see an actual map of all of their assets on the internet, investigate and dig into a wealth of information and take action, such as bringing down a page that is unlawful or dangerous.

Our clients are mainly businesses and agencies looking to secure their internet-facing attack surface. We work with more than 270 enterprise customers, law enforcement agencies, U.S. and foreign government agencies, and eight of the ten largest financial institutions in the U.S.

And in 3-5 sentences, what is Executive Guardian?

DanTo proactively prevent harm against executives in both the cyber and physical realms, RiskIQ Executive Guardian is a service that continuously monitors the surface, deep, and dark webs for indicators of risk or attacks including online digital risk, personal threats, and leaked sensitive information.

A fully managed service, Executive Guardian is managed and run from a secure data room that adheres to rigid compliance standards. it detects high profile individuals’ leaked personal data, tracks what potential attackers can find minimizes the likelihood of information falling into the wrong hands and mitigates risks resulting from exposed data

What problem is RiskIQ trying to solve with this service?

Dan: Your organization’s key executives, leadership, and board of directors are primary targets for hackers and criminals. They attempt to find and leverage or distribute sensitive information about these individuals and use their name, likeness, and personal web presence to target them and their organization.

Why is this more necessary today than ever before?

Dan: Business leaders and high net worth individuals are being targeted more than ever before. Cybercriminals constantly try to find and distribute sensitive information about them. When they’re familiar with someone’s name, likeness and personal web presence, bad actors can sell information about the super-wealthy, or use it against them in digital attacks. Disturbingly, these digital invasions can also translate into real-world attacks: since 2013, 78,617 firms have been scammed out of more than $12 billion (Forbes). The bad guys only had to exploit the financial executives at these companies to make it happen. So-called spearphishing and whaling attacks are two ways to do it.

How does the technology work?

Dan: RiskIQ’s web-crawling technology gives us internet-scale visibility that creates alerts on any data we detect about individuals.  Executive Guardian includes a built-in workflow to generate alerts sent to RiskIQ’s MSS experts to remove content and remediate findings and eliminate leaks quickly.

RiskIQ stores all executive data in a highly-secure data lake with access limited only to individuals with security clearance. This data is analyzed offline, and RiskIQ never enters sensitive information into search engines to prevent the generation and propagation of unwanted content.

How is yours different?

Dan: RiskIQ has unmatched internet telemetry data. Since inception, RiskIQ has continually enhanced its platform’s capabilities by expanding and improving its crawling infrastructure. This global covert proxy network, which combines cloud-based global threat intelligence and analytics with a worldwide network of software-based virtual users, enables security teams to expose threat activity across terabytes of telemetry data. Such data includes 10-20 Million web pages per day, 2 Billion HTTP requests per day, 130+ Million virtual user sessions per month (each includes 1+ web pages) and 22,984,448 mobile apps from 189 app stores currently in our mobile database, 13,067,266 of which are active.

Do you have anymore information for out readers and where can they find you?

Dan: Just like a website, server, or mobile app, your executives are a key attack vector for hackers. No employee is more central to your business operations, nor has access to more sensitive, potentially damaging information. Humans can be data-breached too!

Organizations must combat internet-scale threats with internet-scale visibility. If they have a real-time picture of how their executives appear across the internet, they can understand the massive scope of their attack surface and develop an effective threat management strategy to protect it. You can find out more at https://www.riskiq.com/products/executive-guardian/

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