PANAMA and NEW YORK, March 24, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Constella Intelligence released a first-of-its-kind joint publication that details some of the key debates that have been unfolding in the online public sphere of Latin America and the Caribbean around COVID-19 and reveals the risks that information pollution poses not only for the effectiveness of the pandemic responses but also for social cohesion and the functioning of governance systems.

The research publication titled, “Exploring COVID-19 online debates and information pollution in Latin America and the Caribbean” found that a significant amount of information pollution is created by repackaging, reframing, and reproducing content produced by mainstream media and that approximately 1.4% of the reviewed content in the region could be classified as information pollution. While the proportion may seem small, it corresponds to half a million items over four months, which has an outsized impact on vulnerable audiences. As part of the analysis, UNDP and Constella Intelligence took a deep dive into the significant volume of conversations related to COVID-19, revealing the true nature of online discussions during the pandemic to help identify vulnerabilities and inform strategies to counter the most harmful effects of information pollution.

The analysis explores the public digital sphere in Spanish and English languages from October 2020 to February 2021, capturing 37 million results from 4.4 million profiles across all public platforms including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, media domains, blogs, and other online communities. The report concludes that most of the information pollution originates outside the Latin American and the Caribbean region.

“UNDP has identified information pollution as a key issue that can affect multiple governance and development issues. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the battle against misinformation was already taking shape before COVID-19 and will likely continue to be a matter of significant concern for a long time to come. This report offers relevant insights based on new methods of research and analysis and provides actionable recommendations on how to promote information integrity in the short and long term,” said Luis Felipe López-Calva, UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The document recommends that all short and long-term responses to tackle information pollution should be carried out with human rights at the forefront. It is important that any solutions do not unfairly stigmatize users for legitimate use of the internet or unduly interfere with users’ human rights. To this effect, UNDP is supporting national partners to promote information integrity by strengthening the capacity of public institutions to promote access to reliable and accurate information sources; improving media capacity to effectively manage information pollution; increasing public resilience to information pollution; and developing evidence-based, proportionate and rights-based information integrity policies.

“The research conducted by Constella and the UNDP is a great example of the importance of public-private collaborations delivering insights into global and local trends emerging from the digital public sphere. That joint work is essential to halting the spread of multi-language information pollution. COVID-19 is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Alex Romero, Chief Operating Officer at Constella Intelligence.

The report also urges political leaders, government agencies, media, social media companies, civil society, religious and community leaders, influencers, and personalities to work together to counter information pollution regarding COVID-19, vaccines, and beyond in the region.

“This research is part of a global initiative to improve understanding on disinformation and how it impacts inclusive governance and peacebuilding in the contexts where UNDP operates. The knowledge we get from the report will be used not only in our regional responses but also to inform global policy discussions on the role of disinformation in the global south, which remains poorly understood”, says Arvind Gadgil, Director of UNDP’s Oslo Governance Center.

This initiative was supported and made possible by funding from the Government of Norway. Download the report here to gain insights into key social media trends such as where information pollution originates geographically, how it spreads within and across borders, and which narratives have been propagated most effectively.

ABOUT UNDP:
UNDP is the leading United Nations organization fighting to end the injustice of poverty, inequality, and climate change. Working with our broad network of experts and partners in 170 countries, we help nations to build integrated, lasting solutions for people and the planet. Learn more at www.undp.org or follow at @UNDP. 

Press Release

LOS ALTOS, Calif., March 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), a leading global Digital Risk Protection and Identity Threat Intelligence company, today announced the release of Phishing and Botnet Protection, a new service allowing for the real-time notification of personal data and credential harvesting. 

Constella Phishing and Botnet Protection is a unique service that allows partners the opportunity to alert their customers in real-time when their account credentials or personal data is being harvested, and before their stolen information is being used on the Deep and Dark Web. Phishing and Botnet Protection is an enhancement to Constella’s Intelligence API product. Until this release, no vendor has offered a real-time service around identifying credentials and personal information that have just been harvested by Phishing campaigns. 

“We are thrilled to be able to offer our partners this new service that will further ensure they are able to protect themselves and their customers from being victims of phishing and botnet attacks,” said Kailash Ambwani, CEO of Constella. “Phishing and Botnet Protection will be an essential addition to the array of products and services we offer for digital risk protection.” 

The two components, Phishing and Botnet, will work side-by-side through monitoring technology that detects and provides alerts when Constella’s end-user’s data has been stolen by phishing campaigns or botnet malware.   

With Phishing and Botnet Protection, partners and customers can immediately take protective measures to thwart a breach or abuse of the stolen information—minimizing the potential for financial loss and personal disruption. Customers of Phishing and Botnet Protection will also be prompted to reset passwords for compromised accounts before damage occurs and will have unique and immediate visibility into when they have been victims of an attack. This premium monitoring service will be immediately accessible for existing customers and can be effortlessly combined with other Constella Intelligence products to provide comprehensive monitoring and defense to further protect customers’ data and brands.   

“When consumers’ credentials, such as logins and passwords, are compromised in a breach, they often are not even aware that they’ve been compromised until after their credentials are spotted on the dark web, or after fraud occurs,” said Tracy Kitten, the Director of Fraud & Security at Javelin Strategy & Research. “Providing consumers with real-time, proactive notification of credential compromise, alerting them to change their passwords before their information appears on the dark web, will be essential in the coming years as phishing and botnet campaigns become more prevalent.” 

Press Release

LOS ALTOS, Calif., Nov. 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), a leader in Digital Risk Protection and Identity Threat Intelligence, released their Financial Services Sector Exposure Report: 2018-2021 Findings and Trends. This report comes on the heels of Constella’s 2021 Identity Breach Report, and includes new and additional findings pertaining to exposures, breaches, and leakages within the financial services (Finserv) sector, specifically focusing on employees and executives from the top 20 Finserv companies on the Fortune Global 500 list.

This industry-specific report examines data from January 2018 through September 2021. By analyzing identity records from data breaches and leakages found in open sources, and on the surface, deep, and dark web, Constella Intelligence’s threat intelligence team identified 6,472 breaches or leakages and 3,367,059 exposed records related to employee corporate credentials from the companies analyzed. The proliferation and circulation of this sensitive employee data enables threat actors with the necessary resources to execute a wide range of cyberattacks, including ransomware, impersonation, phishing, account takeover, and several others.

Report Finds Widespread Cyber Vulnerabilities for Top 20 Fortune Global 500 Financial Services CompaniesPost this

“This report should be a wake-up call for every bank, insurance company, stock brokerage, credit card company, and financial institution that they are attractive and viable targets for cyber threat actors,” said Constella Intelligence CEO, Kailash Ambwani. “Companies and individuals must take new precautions to protect themselves from threats with high potential to target employees as a vector to inflict reputational and financial harm.”

Financial institutions are home to an individual’s most sensitive and personally identifiable information, and this report uncovers the widespread prevalence of breaches in the Finserv sector, detailing the serious damage than can be inflicted on customers, employees, executives, and brands.

Key Findings:

• Constella identified over 3.3M exposed records from nearly 6.5K breaches and leakages between 2018 and 2021 from top 20 Global Fortune 500 Finserv companies analyzed.
   
• Two-thirds of breaches and leakages in the Finserv sector since 2018 include PII, with the most common attributes being email (100%) and password (72%).
   
• Finserv sector employees are incurring serious risk by using corporate accounts to register on entertainment, news, retail, gaming, and other technology and services sites.
   
• 70% of C-suite executives profiled from Fortune Global 500 Finserv companies have had their corporate credentials exposed in a breach or leakage since 2018. Of those executives exposed, 98% have been exposed in breaches that include PII, and over 40% had their passwords exposed.

“Left unchecked, this exposed data spells serious digital risk for financial services companies of all sizes,” said Constella’s VP of Threat Intelligence, Sean Tierney, who has worked in various cyber threat roles for companies such as Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, and UBS. “It may seem that major institutions are too large to be seriously affected by cyber threats, but that is far from the case.”

Constella monitors social media and the surface, deep, and dark web for identity-related breaches and verifies the authenticity of those data sets. Click here to download the report.

Press Release

LOS ALTOS, Calif., Sept. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), a leading global Digital Risk Protection and Identity Threat Intelligence company, today announced the launch of Dome. Constella Dome is a modular platform designed to give enterprises a holistic view of the external risks to their people, brands, and assets. The first two modules are Dome Employee Protection and Dome Executive Protection. Constella plans to release additional modules under the Dome platform.

The Dome Employee and Executive Protection modules allow organizations to continuously monitor all employees and executives for external digital risks such as compromised corporate credentials and exposed PII data that can be used for account takeovers, supply chain attacks, ransomware, executive impersonation, and much more.

Only vendor offering a digital risk protection platform that can scale to continuously monitor thousands of employees.Post this

Current industry services are designed to monitor a select number of executives or high-profile individuals due to their reliance on manual processes and human oversight, forcing security teams to choose which few executives to monitor. To help customers address the rapid expansion of digital threats that target other employees as well as executives, Constella has brought to market, for the first time, an automated digital risk protection platform, augmented by human intelligence with our world-class analyst team, that can scale to continuously monitor thousands of employees in an organization. Dome can monitor employees in areas such as IT, HR, and finance who have access to critical systems and sensitive data.

Constella Dome Employee and Executive Protection enables organizations to identify and respond faster to digital risks, such as compromised credentials or leaked confidential data, because it continuously monitors thousands of proprietary and public data sources across the social, surface, deep, and dark web. Constella’s data lake contains over 100 billion attributes and 45 billion curated identity records, the largest in the industry, and the Dome platform provides external digital risk visibility across 53 languages and 125 countries.

With Dome, organizations can leverage real-time alerts to quickly identify and block the use of compromised credentials and initiate takedown of personal information before they can be weaponized and lead to account takeovers, impersonations, reputational attacks, and in extreme cases, cyber or physical threats that put an executive’s or employee’s family at risk.

Dome integrates with an organization’s existing IT and security infrastructure such as Active Directory, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)/Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), and ticketing systems, enabling rapid provisioning and quick remediation. Dome’s automated monitoring, human curation, and customizable threat models that can address a company’s unique policies or requirements ensure that organizations get relevant, high-value insights on a constantly evolving external threat landscape.

“We are excited to take traditional executive protection a step forward by scaling it to protect thousands of employees,” said Kailash Ambwani, CEO of Constella Intelligence. “This platform will allow companies the opportunity to monitor a diversity of digital sources and no longer be forced to choose which executives or employees can be included in digital threat monitoring.”

Dome’s single pane of glass console delivers a holistic view of external risks across the entire enterprise. The Dome platform seamlessly integrates with existing provisioning systems, security tools, and response workflows to improve current systems and processes. Integration with Active Directory ensures fast onboarding and auto-provisioning of employees, executives, and VIPs to monitor. Integration with enterprise platforms, including SIEM and SOAR, will enrich the data in those tools to improve overall threat detection accuracy. ServiceNow integration will speed existing response workflows.

Press Release