“You can no longer assume you’re never going to be hacked. You have to assume that you will be,” says James Chappell, co-founder of cyber threat intelligence company, Digital Shadows. Founded in London in 2011 and coming off a recent funding round of $8 million, Digital Shadows specializes in protecting you and your company’s data and identity. This includes yourself, your employees, and even your clients. With more and more business being conducted online, our digital footprint continues to grow every day and the chance of being hacked or phished grows, as well. Data is going to get out, it’s bound to happen, but that’s where companies like Digital Shadows come in.
Digital Shadows‘ services are meant for enterprise-level business and is meant to protect your company and your clients by tracking your digital footprint. The main feature you are going to find is their internal search engine that crawls the web looking for leaks, threats, and impersonators. What makes their search engine special, however, is the fact that it not only crawls the “normal” web, but the dark web, as well. Without going into too much detail, the dark web (or deep) is where a lot of illegal activity takes place. One such activity is the mass selling of data. Credit card numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, you name it, they probably sell it. It’s not just client data though, the deep web is also where individuals sell confidential data.
Your footprint is bigger than you think.
When you have a large amount of employees (sometimes spread throughout the world) security is a major issue. As secure as your system may be, all it takes is an employee to forget to close out of a browser while on a public computer and the next thing you know, you’re financials are available for purchase on the “black market.” Is this a worse-case scenario? Probably, but the point is that you never know what might happen.
Using this internal search engine and Digital Shadows’ algorithms, it will crawl cloud services, the normal and dark web, and even social media. It crawls 80 million data sources in 27 languages to give you the most comprehensive search possible. Regarding social media, it is looking for accounts that may be impersonating your business or “VIP” employees. These VIP members are typically higher up the command chain and have cause to be impersonated (typically for phishing attempts).
If the company’s recent funding is any indication, enterprise-level security is still a hot topic for investors and clients, and rightfully so. Big data is big money, and protecting that asset is of the utmost importance. While Digital Shadows is great for big business, there are better options for individuals and small business; if you are looking for enterprise-level cyber security that monitors your business and protects your clients and employees, however, then Digital Shadows is worth a look.
Image Credit: Flickr/David Goehring
