This month marks the sixth anniversary of SpyCloud. While security threats have evolved over time, our mission remains the same: to significantly disrupt the cybercriminal economy to eliminate the loss of money, time, and reputation due to online fraud – and ultimately to make the internet a safer place for individuals and businesses.
Over the last six years, our customers have shared their experiences using our products and how SpyCloud helps protect organizations from ATO, ransomware, and online fraud. In honor of our anniversary, let’s take a look at how SpyCloud achieves its mission and the future of the fight against cybercrime.
How SpyCloud’s Mission Aligns to Customer Missions
ATO and online fraud prevention are top of mind for most companies, with our customers spanning dozens of industries and all organization sizes globally. Half of the Fortune 10 use SpyCloud to protect their businesses and consumers, and our customers find that they have a common mission when working with us to stop cybercriminals in their tracks.
A key example of this synergy is SpyCloud’s relationship with EUROCONTROL, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation. EUROCONTROL’s mission to achieve safe air space in Europe aligns well with SpyCloud’s mission to make the internet a safer place. In critical infrastructure industries like aviation where the consequences of ATO and ransomware attacks can have significant impacts, having the ability to quickly identify and remediate compromised credentials can make all the difference in protecting against cyber criminals.
“Aviation tends to be an attractive target for cybercriminals and state-sponsored groups because it is a critical infrastructure sector for a country, and for a lot of countries they are very much dependent on aviation. It can be an important element of the economy, as well as a source of national pride. For aviation, it’s really important to be protected because we are a target for hackers with enhanced capabilities for attacks.”– Patrick Mana, Cyber Security Program Manager and EATM-CERT Manager for EUROCONTROL
SpyCloud’s mission is also strikingly similar to customer Automattic’s motto of “making the web a better place.” Automattic is the company behind one of the most popular online publishing platforms in the world, WordPress.com, as well as other services like Jetpack and WooCommerce that give users additional functionalities related to ecommerce, website security, backups and anti-spam. Customer accounts have become a target for cybercriminals using stolen identity data to siphon personal info, financial details, or just to wreak havoc – so the organization uses SpyCloud Consumer ATO Prevention to help protect against ATO.
“Protecting our customers from account takeover is something we view as our responsibility. Many people may not realize the risk of reusing passwords across multiple accounts. Our goal is to both educate our users and protect their WordPress.com site as much as we can from all forms of attacks.”– Barry Abrahamson, CTO, Automattic
Cybersecurity Best Practices For Everyone
Bringing awareness to password hygiene is an inherent benefit for SpyCloud customers. We’ve heard time and again that customers using SpyCloud Employee ATO Prevention not only protect against ATO, BEC, and ransomware, but they also cultivate an environment for cybersecurity awareness throughout the entire workforce.
For example, the University of Oklahoma faced the same challenge that most higher education institutions face: students and staff use school email accounts for personal use, often reusing their account passwords on multiple sites, which creates a vulnerability for ATO attacks. SpyCloud helps the university remediate compromised accounts quickly and efficiently, while also bringing cybersecurity awareness to faculty and students in the process.
“If you get your password compromised in one place, you can bet it’s compromised everywhere you reuse passwords. We need users to understand the many dangers that are inherent with emails and passwords. OU is striving to be a place of learning that goes beyond the classroom and impacts their everyday lives.”– Aaron Baillio, Deputy CISO at the University of Oklahoma
Going Beyond ATO Prevention: SpyCloud’s Solution Evolution
While our roots remain in the ATO prevention space, SpyCloud continues to recapture data from the criminal underground on a daily basis, with more than 250 billion assets (and growing) that power all of our solutions. Over the last year, we took this data to the next level by doubling down on our cyber analytics engine to help enterprises do more with this information.
Our proprietary engine curates, enriches, and analyzes recaptured data from breaches, malware-infected devices and other underground sources – transforming it into actionable insights that enable enterprises to quickly identify legitimate users vs. potential criminals using stolen information, and take action to prevent account takeover, ransomware, and online fraud. This approach allows SpyCloud to develop more innovative solutions to help enterprises protect their customers, employees, and reputations.
The January launch of SpyCloud Identity Risk Engine was our major foray into the anti-fraud space, helping organizations make more confident fraud decisions based on a curated risk assessment of users based on their exposure in the criminal underground; not just the exposure of an individual email address, but all correlated email addresses associated with the individual’s identity. It’s a feat only achieved through the power of our analytics. Identity Risk Engine get much closer to answering the questions, is it really a consumer on the other end of the account creation or transaction or a fraudster, giving organizations the power to introduce more or less friction into customer experience.
In March of this year, we launched a new solution that expanded our ability to help enterprises prevent fraud tied to malware: SpyCloud Session Identity Protection. It offers early warning of malware-infected consumers whose compromised web session cookies appear in malware data recaptured by SpyCloud, and are therefore at extreme risk of costly, difficult-to-detect fraud.
And there’s more to come. With more innovative solutions in our roadmap, we’re continually evolving our solutions to help make the internet a safer place.
The Future is Bright in the Fight Against Cybercrime
As we continue to shine a light into the criminal underground, the last six years have been a ramp-up for what’s to come from SpyCloud. Our teams are working non-stop to find innovative ways to use our cyber analytics engine and our trove of recaptured data to protect enterprises and consumers from ever-evolving cyber threats.
