The security landscape is changing. Today’s threats are increasingly sophisticated—from social engineering to impersonation to disinformation campaigns—targeting brands, reputations, and key individuals, as well as assets. With every advance in digital transformation comes new threat actors ready to exploit any weakness, including hacktivists, criminal groups, and even terrorist organizations with political or social aims.
Recent headlines shed light on the complexity and severity of the current situation: this year, we saw cybercriminals execute a spear-phishing attack and exfiltrate data from Jeff Bezos’ smartphone. On social media, unauthorized direct message screenshots containing racist language were leaked via the hacked Instagram account of Stefano Gabbana, prompting Dolce & Gabbana to pull products from major Chinese e-commerce sites. Elon Musk was scammed by fake accounts as cybercriminals duped people into sending imposters cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. In addition to executive impersonation, we saw brands being targeted as well–in Q3 2020, Microsoft was the most impersonated brand with 19% of all global brand phishing attempts, up from 7% the previous quarter.
As cybercriminals continue to adapt, so must the people and organizations on the frontlines of the cyberwar. Today, 4iQ, the identity intelligence leader known for its mastery of the Dark Web, and Alto Analytics, the AI-driven leader that applies data science to the digital public sphere, have joined forces to become Constella. Simply put, Constella aims to make the world a safer place by helping organizations anticipate and defeat digital risk.
Why merge? Why now?
We believe the way to defeat digital risk is by working together to safeguard key interests. Constella will combine 4iQ’s investigation platforms, proprietary data lake, which archives more than 25 billion identity records, with Alto’s vast trove of public sphere data and best-in-class analytics to enable organizations to anticipate and mitigate risks to their business, their people, and their reputations
The adoption of social and collaboration channels that bypass traditional enterprise security, along with a growing remote workforce that transforms the organization into a highly distributed environment, is resulting in a growing risk surface requiring a wider field of vision and engagement across the entire C-level of an organization.
What organizations urgently need is a new approach to keep one step ahead: better anticipation of emerging threats, proactive analysis, and adversary identification, to act before harm is inflicted.
Following a recent round of Series C funding for 4iQ, Constella will leverage the combination of our artificial intelligence-enabled software, world-class security analysts and data scientists, and exceptionally deep datasets, to arm our customers with an unprecedented perspective on, and control over, digital risk.
Our brand, Constella, may be new, but the passion for empowering intel analysts, security professionals, and criminal investigators with capabilities to discover, uncover and disrupt adversaries is a product of the rich legacies of 4iQ and Alto Analytics. We have more exciting announcements just around the corner, but in the meantime, stay tuned by watching the video below, following us on Twitter and LinkedIn, signing up for our monthly newsletter, and exploring our new website. Also, check out the official press release of today’s announcement.
By Kailash Ambwani, Chief Executive Officer, Constella Intelligence
Interested in our work? Please contact us at info@constellaintelligence.com. To learn more about Constella, subscribe to our newsletter below.
