Constella Publishes 2021 Identity Breach Report

The Constella Team on July 30, 2021

LOS ALTOS, Calif., July 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), a leader in Digital Risk Protection and Identity Threat Intelligence, released their 2021 Identity Breach Report, PII Fuelling the Threat Economy: How Crisis Creates Targeted Vulnerabilities for Individuals, Executives, and Brands. The report evaluates data collected from Constella’s extensive database of over 45 billion archived identity records from data breaches and leakages found on the surface, deep, and dark web in addition to trends identified in deep and dark marketplaces over the past year.

The report found that the COVID-19 pandemic engendered new vulnerabilities in the digital ecosystem for threat actors to exploit, resulting in items like vaccines, fraudulent vaccine certificates, and other COVID-19 related items being sold in dark marketplaces and underground forums. Constella’s research analyzed the value of personally identifiable information (PII), drawing links between the breach economy, PII, and a range of emerging digital threats to executives and brands. Notably, Constella, observed an exorbitant spike in the price of sensitive personal records sold in the deep and dark web, with the price of driver’s licenses, passports, and ID cards increasing significantly from the previous year analyzed – plausibly due to an increased demand for personal records during the pandemic. Constella’s 2021 Identity Breach Report also includes a deep dive into the top companies in the Energy and Telecommunications sectors that appeared in the Fortune Global 500 list, demonstrating increasing exposure and vulnerability of companies in the sector, employees, and executives over the past year.

Report: New COVID Cyber Vulnerabilities, Exposures for Energy & Telecom Sectors/Executives, and Dark Market COVID ItemsPost this

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the fragility of our online infrastructure,” said Constella Intelligence CEO, Kailash Ambwani. “As people continue to rely on digital solutions and working from home, both companies and individuals must take new precautions to protect themselves from potential threat actors.”

Key Findings From 2020 Include:

Nearly 60% of the data breaches analyzed exposed some form of PII and 72% of these breaches included passwords.
Over 40% of executives from a sample of Fortune 500 companies in Energy and Telecommunications sectors were exposed in a breach over the last 5 years.
Fortune 500 companies in Energy and Telecommunications have had their corporate domains exposed in approximately 11k breaches/leakages since 2016, and over 40% of these exposures occurred since 2020, indicating worsening security of corporate credentials.
Out of a sample of 55 Fortune 500 Energy executives, nearly 1/4 have had their passwords exposed.
Constella observed the sale of vaccine doses—such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, and Sputnik—in multiple dark marketplaces ranging from as little as $8 to as much as nearly $850.
Crypto-Currency, News, and Healthcare industries saw 120%, 110%, and 51% increases (respectively) in breaches and leakages compared to 2019.
Compared to the findings in Constella’s 2020 Identity Breach Report, the price of personal records transacted in dark marketplaces increased significantly, including passports (+1,185%), and driver’s licenses (+328%), ID cards (+642%), possibly due to increased demand for false identification records during the pandemic.

“Threat actors continue to find new ways to target individual and company data due to new vulnerabilities created in times of uncertainty and crisis. PII continues to fuel malign activities in the digital ecosystem,” said Alex Romero, COO of Constella Intelligence. “Executives are specifically being targeted for their high-level access within organizations.”

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

Press Release

Constella Intelligence Launches Constella Connect Partner Program

The Constella Team on June 30, 2021

LOS ALTOS, Calif., June 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), a global Digital Risk Protection leader, announced today the Constella Connect Partner Program (CCPP) for MSSPs, MSPs and MDRs. The program enables Constella channel partners to protect customers’ digital assets by monitoring company domains for exposures arising from other companies’ prior breaches. Constella has also announced the launch of its new domain monitoring solution, Constella Domain Monitoring, which enables partners to monitor the dark web for leaked information relating to a domain and corporate employee identities.

Constella has previously leveraged its identity records collected from the dark web to protect individual’s identity through its Intelligence API. This new offering builds on this experience to create a domain monitoring portal which allows partners to search for corporate domains belonging to their customers and identify any exposure relating to the domain(s) on the dark web.

“Constella is excited to partner with leading cybersecurity companies across the globe, including our first MSSP partner, ITC Secure, to help anticipate and defeat digital risks,” said Constella Intelligence CEO Kailash Ambwani. “Our partners will be able to identify compromised credentials quickly to help shut down breaches before major damage can occur or contain damage during an active attack. They will be able to leverage the largest commercial identity data lake to initiate or enhance high value security conversations with their customers.”

Constella Intelligence Adds Value to Partner Offerings
Constella Connect is positioned to be part of a comprehensive cybersecurity portfolio enabling partners to bring incremental value to existing solutions.

Program benefits include:

Access to newly launched product offering, Constella Domain Monitoring
Early access to new digital risk protection offerings
Accelerate business growth and stand out in a highly competitive MXP market by adding a powerful and differentiated solution to your portfolio.

Customer benefits include:

Automated deep, dark & surface web monitoring
Real-time alerts when your brand or executives are mentioned by threat actors or leaked on the web.
Tap into the largest, most accurate database of social and dark web activity.

With an easy-to-use SaaS-based portal, and little training required, partners can quickly and efficiently monitor multiple domains for multiple companies in one easy-to-use dashboard and immediately see results for what has been breached in order to quickly alert customers and remediate.

Press Release

COO of Constella Intelligence, Alex Romero, Joins Forbes Business Council

Laura Bruck on June 8, 2021

COO of Constella Intelligence, Alex Romero, Joins Forbes Business Council

PRESS RELEASE

Alex and Constella officially engage with the Forbes Council community of business and technology leaders.

Los Altos, Calif., June 8, 2021. Constella Intelligence (“Constella”) is excited to announce that Alex Romero, Co-founder, and COO of Constella Intelligence —has been invited to become a member of the Forbes Business Council. Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for well-established tech leaders and executives — CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, and others — selected for the Council based on their deep knowledge and diverse experiences in the industry. The Council is part of Forbes Councils Groups program, a new initiative designed to better connect and engage members through the creation of councils based on location, industry, identity, and interests to ensure maximum benefit of the community. Before founding Constella, Alex successfully steered global companies in digital industry development in more than 20 different markets. Starting out as a manager for Alcatel, he later joined Vodafone Group, where he forged strategic relationships with global partners such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, YouTube, eBay, and Google. He developed Yahoo! Business in Southern Europe and was a vice president at Viacom for Southern Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, and Africa before founding the big data analytics firm Alto Analytics, a pioneer in AI-powered analysis of the digital public sphere. In 2020, Alto joined forces with identity intelligence leader, 4iQ, to create one company—Constella Intelligence. Alex is also a council member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Endeavor Entrepreneurs Network.“We are honored to welcome Alex into the community,” said Scott Gerber, founder of Forbes Councils, the collective that includes Forbes Business Council. “Our mission with Forbes Councils is to bring together proven leaders from every industry, creating a curated, social capital-driven network that helps every member grow professionally and make an even greater impact on the business world.”“The connections, visibility, and growth offered by the Forbes Councils are truly exciting. My team and I are eager to engage with the Business Council and its members to strengthen reciprocal, trusting relationships while sharing our unique knowledge of anticipating and defending against emerging risks to organizations and individuals in the digital ecosystem. We are confident that our contributions will support meaningful
relationships across a network of seasoned industry leaders.” remarked Alex.

ABOUT FORBES COUNCILS

Forbes Councils is a collective of invitation-only communities created in partnership with Forbes and the expert community builders who founded the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC). In Forbes Councils, exceptional business owners and leaders come together with the people and resources that can help them thrive. To learn more about Forbes Councils, visit forbescouncils.com.

ABOUT CONSTELLA INTELLIGENCE

Constella Intelligence is a global leader in Digital Risk Protection that works in partnership with some of the world´s largest organizations to safeguard what matters most and defeat digital risk. Our solutions are a unique combination of proprietary data, technology, and human expertise to anticipate, identify, and remediate targeted threats to your executives, your brand and your assets at scale—powered by the most extensive breach, surface, deep and dark data collection on the planet, with over 100 billion attributes and 45 billion curated identity records spanning 125 countries and 53 languages.

To learn more about how you can proactively anticipate, identify, and remediate targeted threats to your executives, your assets and your brand visit us at constella.ai .

Constella Introduces Exposed Identity Score

The Constella Team on May 26, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Constella Intelligence Introduces Exposed Identity Score

New feature indicates the level of risk for exposed identities, included with select offerings at no additional cost

LOS ALTOS, Calif., May 27, 2021 – Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), a leader in Digital Risk Protection and Threat Intelligence, today announced that the Company’s Intelligence API now includes Exposed Identity Score as part of its service offering. Organizations must rapidly adapt to evolving customer behavior and interaction points – or risk significant losses in both fraud and customers. By analyzing exposed attributes, the type of site, the data in which the data was sourced, and the freshness of the data, this new score helps partners equip their customers and organizations with a powerful tool to better associate the level of risk with the exposed credentials.

”Inadequate ID verification services create gaps that fraudsters can exploit,” said Jason Wagner, Vice President of Identify Intelligence at Constella Intelligence. “To keep pace with evolving threats, organizations need multi-layered solutions that can associate risks with exposed credentials.”For Exposed Identity Score, Constella dynamically computes a high-level simplified estimated risk rating for all available breaches, based on how impactful the exposed records are projected to be. Constella’s algorithm design and values are gleaned from the Company’s ongoing research of fraud mitigation professionals and practices.

Exposed Identity Score (EIS) can be used to assess the importance of an identity alert and assess the risk an identity poses to suffering an Identity Theft incident (aggregating all the individual risks of each exposure). EIS, along with the quality, volume, and coverage of our Intelligence API, helps organizations stay one step ahead of attackers to identify exposures proactively.To learn more about how Constella’s Exposed Identity Score can enhance your identity protection capabilities or security protocols, visit us here or request a personalized demo to see the new EIS in action.

The results are in! Constella Intelligence releases third Annual Survey Findings

The Constella Team on May 20, 2021

Constella Intelligence research reveals that one in four cybersecurity leaders use the same passwords for both work and personal use; more than half experience account takeover first-hand

Constella Intelligence Participating in First-Ever ‘Identity Management Day’ on April 13, 2021

Laura Bruck on April 11, 2021

Constella Intelligence Participating in First-Ever ‘Identity Management Day’ on April 13, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Identity Management Day, founded by the Identity Defined Security Alliance, aims to educate and engage business leaders and IT decision-makers on the intersection of identity management and security

LOS ALTOS, Calif., April 13, 2021 – Constella Intelligence, a leading global Digital Risk Protection business, today announced that it is participating in the first ever ‘Identity Management Day,’ an annual awareness event that will take place on the second Tuesday in April each year. The inaugural Identity Management Day is being held today, April 13, 2021.Founded by the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA), the mission of Identity Management Day is to educate business leaders and IT decision makers on the importance of identity management and key components including governance, identity-centric security best practices, processes, and technology, with a special focus on the dangers of not properly securing identities and access credentials.In addition, the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) will provide guidance for consumers, to ensure that their online identities are protected through security awareness, best practices, and readily available technologies.

Constella helps reduce the risks created from exposed identity information found in open sources on the surface, social, deep and dark webs, by empowering intel analysts, security researchers, criminal investigators and identity protection providers with capabilities to unmask adversaries and prevent fraud, identity theft, account takeover, and cyber espionage. To support this exciting initiative, Constella continues to promote identity management best practices and recommendations for securing employee, customer and third-party identities.

“Raising awareness around identity management is especially critical after a barrage of identity-based breaches made headlines in the past year, including Twitter, Marriott, and Nintendo. In fact, research by the IDSA reveals that 79% of organizations have experienced an identity-related security breach in the last two years, and 99% believe their identity-related breaches were preventable,” said Julie Smith, Executive Director of the IDSA.

Smith continued, “Compounding this, the ongoing pandemic has accelerated digital transformation initiatives that support changes in how we work and how we live day-to-day, putting organizations at greater risk. Our hope is that Identity Management Day will result in higher prioritization of identity security and, as a result, fewer data breaches in 2021 and beyond. We are grateful for all of the support from IDSA and NCSA member companies and the broader industry to further this mission.”

To learn more about and get involved in Identity Management Day 2021, please visit www.identitymanagementday.org and check out #IDMgmtDay on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Constella Intelligence

Constella Intelligence is a leading global Digital Risk Protection business that works in partnership with some of the world’s largest organizations to safeguard what matters most and defeat digital risk. Its solutions are broad, collaborative and scalable, powered by a unique combination of proprietary data, technology and human expertise—including the largest breach data collection on the planet, with over 100 billion attributes and 45 billion curated identity records spanning 125 countries and 53 languages. Learn more about Constella by visiting constellaintelligence.com.

About the Identity Defined Security Alliance

The IDSA is a group of identity and security vendors, solution providers, and practitioners that acts as an independent source of thought leadership, expertise, and practical guidance on identity centric approaches to security for technology professionals. The IDSA is a nonprofit that facilitates community collaboration to help organizations reduce risk by providing education, best practices, and resources.

Follow the IDSA
Join the Community: https://forum.idsalliance.org/
Twitter: www.twitter.com/idsalliance
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/identity-defined-security-alliance/
Blog: https://www.idsalliance.org/blog/

Constella Introduces Surface Web Data to Bolster Intelligence API Offering

Laura Bruck on March 21, 2021

Constella Introduces Surface Web Data to Bolster Intelligence API Offering

PRESS RELEASE

Constella API Now Offers the Most Advanced Identity Threat Protection Through the Addition of Surface Web Data

LOS ALTOS, Calif. and MADRID, March 25, 2020 – Constella Intelligence, a leading global Digital Risk Protection company, today announced that the Company’s API now includes surface web data as part of its service offering. This new data source – which builds upon the most extensive breach data collection on the planet – enables Constella to track regular, day-to-day web activity to quickly alert on and defend against exposures of customer identity information. When a data breach occurs, the stolen data often ends up on the dark web — the black market of the internet where cyberthieves buy and sell this information for profit. The “surface web” is the area where data can be deliberately posted, such as deepdarkshop.com or, in some cases, innocently used or leaked through social media sites, online shopping, reading news feeds, and visiting business, informational, and entertainment websites. By monitoring this vector in real-time, Constella can help prevent identity data from falling into the wrong hands in all web locations, enabling faster and more comprehensive protection for consumers. Constella can also help users identify what data is publicly available. With the uptick in social engineering and phishing attacks, information available on the web is increasingly valuable to cyber thieves & criminals. Identifying legitimate and illegitimate personal data on the surface is the next step in the evolution of protecting oneself.“The surface or public web is the indexed part of the web that we all can access,” said Jason Wagner, Vice President of Identify Intelligence at Constella Intelligence. “Introducing the ability for our partners to monitor this part of the web and this data allows us to offer a complete monitoring solution for identity theft and privacy providers to protect their customers fully. Our partners can now leverage our artificial intelligence alongside our technology platforms to search and monitor the entire web for sensitive and non-sensitive data.”Recent studies suggest a direct correlation between an individual’s actions and the representation of digital brands online, yet 56% of adults don’t actively think about the consequences of their online activities. In fact, 70% of employers did not hire an applicant based upon content found online. By integrating Constella’s surface web data, partners can now enhance and extend their service offerings to help customers identify how their digital reputation and personal brands appear and how others may perceive it.To learn more about how Constella’s Intelligence API can enhance your protection capabilities, visit us here or request a personalized demo to see the enhanced Intelligence API in action.About Constella IntelligenceConstella Intelligence is a leading provider of Digital Risk Protection and Threat Intelligence services that help unmask adversaries and defend against external threats.

Constella’s solutions are powered by a unique combination of proprietary data, technology, and human expertise—including the most extensive breach data collection on the planet, with over 100 billion attributes and 66 billion curated identity records spanning 125 countries and 53 languages. Learn more about Constella by visiting constellaintelligence.com.

Constella Intelligence Expands Executive Leadership Team Amid Continued Revenue Growth

The Constella Team on February 18, 2021

LOS ALTOS, Calif., Feb. 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), a global Digital Risk Protection leader, announced today it has added five members to its executive leadership team, building upon a momentous 2020 in which the company integrated 4iQ and Alto Analytics, upgraded its product portfolio, expanded its global footprint, and significantly grew revenue. Andy Johnson has joined the company as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Laura Juanes as the Company’s first Chief Privacy and Compliance Officer, Scott Whitney as Chief Product Officer, Cynthia Crossland as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Brian Laing as VP of Business Development.

Andy Johnson will lead finance, human resources, and administrative functions and joins Constella from AT&T, where he served as CFO of its Cyber Security business unit. Prior to AT&T, Andy served as CFO at AlienVault, a leading cyber threat detection and intelligence company, which AT&T acquired in 2018.

Laura Juanes Micas joins as Chief Privacy and Compliance Officer — a newly created position, which reflects Constella’s dedication and commitment to data protection — to oversee the development of Constella’s Privacy and Compliance program. She is a multilingual law, policy and privacy expert in the technology industry, previously at Facebook, where she led a global team providing policy and regulatory advice on privacy issues impacting how individuals use technology daily.

As Chief Product Officer, Scott Whitney will be responsible for developing and driving the vision, roadmap and innovation strategy to unify Constella’s product portfolio. He will lead a global product team. Scott brings over 20 years of experience focused on the development and growth of enterprise software products including Actiance, Symantec and Mimosa Systems.

Cynthia Crossland will oversee the corporate branding, communications, and go-to-market strategy for Constella. She brings senior marketing leadership experience from B2B companies at different growth stages, ranging from start-ups to large-scale, public companies including OverOps, Actiance, and Interactive Data Corp.

Brian Laing will lead business development and strategic partnerships. He joins from Lastline (acquired by Vmware in 2020) where he served as SVP of Business Development and Corporate Development. Prior to Lastline, Brian was the CSO/Founder of Redseal Networks, which was acquired by STG in 2019.

In the past year, key milestones for the company include:

48% year-over-year recurring bookings growth
73% year-over-year ARR (annual recurring revenue) growth
Constella Data Lake™, which includes the largest breach data collection on the planet, grew over 40% in the past year, surpassing 25 billion credential records
During the same period, Constella tripled the number of digital assets it monitors and alerts on behalf of customers and surpassed 20 billion social posts analyzed

“The rising tide of cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, and geopolitical threats has made our mission to ‘make the world a safer place’ more relevant than ever before,” said Constella Intelligence CEO Kailash Ambwani. “These leaders are critical to the realization of that mission. They will help us build the infrastructure to support our growth, strengthen our privacy and data protection policies, accelerate product innovation, and help drive our customer engagement. All towards the goal of helping our customers anticipate and defeat digital risks.”

Press Release

Constella Intelligence Upgrades Hunter for Efficient, Targeted and Intuitive Investigations

The Constella Team on January 7, 2021

LOS ALTOS, Calif., Jan. 7, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), a leading global Digital Risk Protection business, today announced the release of Hunter, a platform for investigating threat actors and unmasking attackers that helps users efficiently attribute identities and identify further intelligence across multiple data sources simultaneously. The tool is used by government and other public agencies, financial, enterprise and healthcare organizations, and many others. Hunter, which builds upon the product formerly known as IDHunt Core, provides a better user experience and new features specifically requested by customers to speed investigations of threat actors.

“Hunter offers myriad advantages to customers, including user-friendly navigation, targeted threat analysis – not to mention that it taps into the largest breach data collection on the planet,” said cybersecurity analyst Ed Amoroso, CEO of TAG Cyber. “Following Constella’s recent funding round, leadership change and rebrand, it’s clear the company is looking to broaden its solution portfolio, and this is a great start.”

Notable upgraded features include:

Comprehensive, Intuitive Visualizations – Visualize collected data in a dedicated, controlled workspace to easily identify links and conduct network analysis for a complete investigative picture—incorporating multiple sources and manual entries, downloading, saving and uploading, as needed.
New Sources – Efficiently correlate and enrich data from Constella’s proprietary breach data lake, Paste bins, Passive DNS, WHOIS domain history, cryptocurrency, social profiles, standard search engines, Dark Web forums and other sources.
Fluid Investigation Management – Create, save and share multiple investigations with colleagues for collaborative working.

“I have been using Hunter to aid in Human Trafficking investigations and it has certainly been one of the more powerful tools we have in our arsenal,” said Larry Cameron, Chief Information Security Officer, Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII). “Hunter allows us to pivot on phone numbers, email addresses and addresses and perform an instant deep dive into our adversaries – finding the needles in the haystack in order to uncover identities that are linked to Human Trafficking. Our partners and I have also been blown away by Hunter’s new graphing capabilities. It’s exactly what we needed in order to paint a visual picture of the massive data lake.”

“To prevent cyber-enabled crimes, you must have context to unmask whoever is truly behind the attack. Hunter provides organizations the opportunity to explore multiple data sources, allowing them to interact and compare across these sources in a simple easy to use platform,” said Constella Intelligence CMO Cynthia Crossland.

Constella, which was formed by the combination of 4iQ and Alto Analytics in December 2020, protects more than 25 million users and 100 organizations worldwide. The Company is fully committed to becoming the most trusted partner for anticipating and defeating digital risk.

Press Release

4iQ and Alto Analytics Merge and Rebrand as Constella Intelligence

The Constella Team on December 15, 2020

LOS ALTOS, Calif. and MADRID, Dec. 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — 4iQ, the leader in identity intelligence, and Alto Analytics, a leader in applying AI & data science to the digital public sphere, today announced the two companies have merged and rebranded as Constella Intelligence (“Constella”), effective immediately. With advanced analytics, deep human expertise, and broad data sets — from surface to dark web, including the largest breach data collection on the planet with over 100 billion attributes and 45 billion curated identity records spanning 125 countries and 53 languages — Constella will help organizations anticipate digital risks and safeguard critical business interests.

Kailash Ambwani, CEO of 4iQ, will serve as CEO of Constella. Alejandro Romero, Founder and CEO of Alto Analytics, will serve as COO. Under their guidance, Constella will empower organizations and intelligence professionals with comprehensive digital risk protection that covers brand, executive, fraud, geopolitical and identity threats.

“Constella combines 4iQ’s investigation platforms and proprietary data lake, which archives more than 45 billion identity records, with Alto’s vast trove of public sphere data, advanced proprietary technology, and best-in-class analytics to enable organizations to anticipate and mitigate risks to their business, their people, and their reputations,” said Ambwani. “We look forward to empowering those on the cyber frontlines with better anticipation of emerging threats, proactive analysis and adversary identification — so they can act before any harm is inflicted.”

“Our combined capabilities enable us to take on some of the most important missions that our customers are pursuing as they combat new forms of digital risk,” said Romero. “We’re not just keeping our customers secure, we’re making the world a safer place.”

To defeat digital risk, Constella ensures that knowledge flows and teams work together across all areas of risk to safeguard key interests. The combination of artificial intelligence-enabled software, security analysts and data scientists, and exceptionally deep datasets translates directly into Constella customers being more empowered with unprecedented digital risk visibility and control.

“Through successful 4iQ Series C funding and the powerful combination of two market-leading organizations, Constella has incredible tools and resources to tackle the fast-evolving security landscape,” said Alberto Yepez, Constella Board chair and co-founder and managing director of ForgePoint Capital, a leading investor. “I’m confident the synergies will drive seamless integration and I look forward to continued work with Kailash and the team.”

As a global leader in Digital Risk Protection, Constella is determined to make the world a safer place. Already protecting more than 25 million users and over 100 organizations worldwide through a workforce of more than 200 employees, the new organization has its sights set on broadening its solution portfolio and growing its geographic footprint and customer base. Its diverse multinational team currently operates in more than 10 countries and is fully committed to becoming the most trusted partner for defeating digital risk. Learn more about Constella by visiting constellaintelligence.com.

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