When we look at the threat landscape over the past year, we have been inundated with attacks on our critical infrastructure, healthcare organizations, and even our election systems. It’s hard to deny these threats are serious and escalating.
But there is also a new threat surface emerging, one that has proven to have a critical cybersecurity gap as our lives and businesses became increasingly digital and channeled through Facebook, Instagram, Zoom, Slack, and other online channels. As we realize the many benefits of these tools, we also open ourselves to new risk levels.
For each collaboration, social media, or mobile chat tool we adopt, we are also incrementally (or sometimes significantly) expanding our attack surface. That effect has magnified over the past year due to our rapid shift to Work from Anywhere, where I know myself, and many other employees and individuals have stepped away from the office and turned to these digital channels to stay effective.
As we begin to rely more and more on these communication channels, they are also starting to turn against us. Attackers are actively targeting these platforms with phishing schemes, ransomware attacks, social engineering, and more. These threats are no longer hypothetical — they are here right now, and companies everywhere must begin to address this entirely new digital threat landscape.
It is clear that in today’s Work from Anywhere and the social-driven world that we need a new set of technologies to address this threat landscape that falls beyond what is contained on our corporate networks. That is why we are excited to announce our continued investment in SafeGuard Cyber by leading a $45 million Strategic Growth Financing Round with participation from Cisco and Allegis Cyber.
SafeGuard Cyber protects these vulnerable digital connections with agentless architecture and AI analytics, allowing a business to focus on what matters. In total, it can secure and ensure compliance for more than 50 collaboration, mobile chat, social media, and cloud-based communication channels — many of which we use every day without consideration for their security implications. The SafeGuard Cyber digital risk technology is proven by customers in the Global 100, municipalities, and government.
Securing communications sounds simple in theory, but the execution is complex. The volume and velocity of digital communications make human supervision impossible. One of SafeGuard Cyber’s customers generates 118,000+ WhatsApp messages alone per month. That’s where machine learning comes into play to identify risks and surface critical events that require immediate action.
While an employee’s social or mobile chat account may represent a vulnerability to the organization, many of these accounts are private. A question that came to the forefront during the pandemic is how to protect company data and communications while also balancing employees’ privacy in a noninvasive way. The company addresses this with its TotalPrivacy capability, which masks contents for any channel while still surfacing security risks.
The outcome is a CMO or CIO can utilize the power of social networks, collaboration, and mobile chat tools, without creating additional risk and empowering the Chief Compliance Officers and CISOs to secure the entire global organization from device to digital without disrupting the end user.
When we look at the cybersecurity, safety, security and privacy (CSSP) landscape, we believe this is one of the most significant emerging threats that has yet to be addressed — or even fully understood — by most companies. We are committed to protecting and investing in this digital landscape and believe SafeGuard Cyber has the team and the technology to do it.
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