Detect Signs of Stalking in Real Time to Keep Employees Safe

Online stalking, or cyberstalking, is on the rise. Covid-19 has only exasperated the problem, with lockdowns increasing the vulnerability of victims as people continue to spend exponentially more time online. In fact, Paladin (UK’s national stalking advocacy service) reported having a 50% to 70% increase in requests for support around stalking cases during the pandemic.

In one UK study, 358 cases of homicides were analysed. The results indicated that in 94% of these homicides, the victim was stalked before the homicide took place. This statistic indicates how important it is to recognise stalker-like behavior before a potential violence occurs. Organizations who exercise the highest standards of Duty of Care and want to keep their employees safe, understand the importance of detecting signs of stalking before the problem snowballs.

Cyberstalking is on the rise

• Stalking on social media:

  • Facebook

  • Instagram

  • Twitter

  • Snapchat

  • TikTok

• Stalking via private messaging platforms:

  • WeChat

  • Telegram

  • Whatsapp

  • Facebook Messenger

• Other stalking techniques:

  • Virtually visiting victims on street maps

  • Looking at victim geotags

  • Hijacking webcams

  • Catfishing

How Signal Helps

Using Signal, analysts discovered X, a stalker using social media, harassing a client’s employee. In a 4-week span this user sent approximately 1500 social media posts mentioning said employee. The content of X’s posts includes photographs of the employee’s children, mentions 9 hand-written letters posted to the client, marriage proposals, and also sentiment seesawing between love-speech and hate-speech. X also contacted other employees, especially when the desired effect on the first employee wasn’t achieved.

Using the data found, analysts took X’s content and ran it through various analysis steps to prepare a data set to be included in a dossier. The most popular words and phrases were pulled from the posts, then further analysed by Signal.

The prepared dossier was shared with the client so that they could instigated their employee support  process for dealing with online harassment. 

Benefits of Signal’s Stalker Threat Preventative System

Signal helps prevent the potential psychological trauma of employees, physical harm, and at worst violence or loss of life. 

Stalking causes business disruptions as well. Companies whose employees fall victim to stalking will lose productivity each year. Impacts include reduced or lost output, increases in staff turnover, increases in absenteeism, investment required for support programs and increased management overhead. Collectively, victims of stalking will lose approximately $110 billion over a lifespan.

Signal can detect harassment in real time. Client analysts or analysts from Signal can watch for stalker-like behavior and notify you as soon it is detected. This information in turn is used to trigger employee support programs and increased monitoring to ensure escalation doesn't occur.  

We can save your employees and business potential time, harm and money. Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo.

7 Growing Cybersecurity Threats Professionals are Increasingly Worried About

The new softwares and systems that are employed across an organization create new attack vectors for threat actors and new data security concerns. Not only that but as these new digital systems are put into use to replace once manual tasks additional complications arise from potential user errors, for example, an employee might make private data public without even realising. 

In this article, we take a look at 7 of the growing concerns that cyber and infosec professionals hold as this trend towards digitizations continues at an increasingly explosive pace.

1. Unintentional Data Exposure

“To err is human,“ as Alexander Pope famously wrote. We all make mistakes and to combat this we have progressively leveraged more technology across industries to automate processes and reduce the potential for human error. However, technology can’t prevent our every mistake, and paradoxically, this use of technology increases the amount of data we as people and organizations produce and store in our systems. Hackers are aware of this and continue to find creative ways to exploit human weakness with strategies such as complex phishing campaigns.  

On top of this, the adoption and rapid development of hardware (phones, for example) mean many people conduct work from their personal mobile device. And the move towards work from home driven by the COVID-19 pandemic has furthered this merger of work and personal devices as well as increased the amount of work done from unsecured networks.

2. Adoption of AI into Malware for Scale and Evasion

Denial of service attacks can take a variety of forms, from malware to DDoS attacks, and have huge financial implications for an organization. In 2018, for example, shipping giant Maersk had their IT systems taken out by a vicious malware called NotPetya, costing them an estimate $300 million.

These ransomware attacks might be driven by political motives, thoughts of financial gain, or something else entirely. Over the last few years, these tactics have evolved they’ve adopted new technologies and strategies allowing threat actors to increase both the scale of the attacks, as well as to more effectively neutralize increasingly complex security protocols.

One increasing concern is the adoption of AI into these attacks. AI can be used in a variety of ways, such as increasing the effectiveness of phishing campaigns. One example was developed by IBM Research, DeepLocker. DeepLocker hides its malicious payload in benign carrier applications, such as a video conference software, to avoid detection by most antivirus and malware scanners and then uses facial recognition to identify the specific target and launch its payload.

How AI is used to could completely change the way information security and cybersecurity professionals, in general, need to adapt and respond to threats.

3. Financial Fraud

Financial fraud off the back of data breaches is nothing new. However, it continues to be a problem today and into the foreseeable future. Data breaches from large organizations, whether they are related to your organization or not could easily lead to new attack vectors on your company.

There is a huge amount of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) for sale on the dark web. This data can be used in a number of ways, from credential stuffing strategies to identifying high-value targets and refining strategies for spear-phishing campaigns.

4. 3rd Party Integrations

Often organizations spend a huge amount of time and money ensuring their internal cybersecurity practices are excellent. It only takes one breach to realize the efficacy of this investment. Successful ransomware, for example, against an organization for example could cost tens of millions not even considering the reputational damages that might accompany the financial ones.

However, as was seen with the 2020 SolarWinds breach, it doesn’t matter how well educated your staff, how up to date your firewalls, how alert your security teams are if your third party integrations have weaknesses.

5. Increasing Amounts of Sensitive Data Collected Through IoT Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) devices is beginning to infiltrate every level of our lives. From mobile robots, to inventory tracking, to personal assistants, connected speakers and smart TVs. These devices seek to automate and simplify our lives.

However, what many people don’t realize is that these machines are often insecure by design and offer attackers new opportunities. Additionally, the terms and conditions around data sharing and usage from many of these devices lack transparency, and by utilizing this technology an organization makes it increasingly difficult to know and control what data is going out.

Finally, it’s often the case that, while a vendor may recommend applying new firmware updates, they are not applied unless the device starts misbehaving and someone applies the update to troubleshoot the issue. This could lead to serious security compromises.

6. Rise of Fake Online Personas

This threat can have a direct and dramatic impact on organizations reputation and the physical security of employees. By creating and leveraging fake or phantom social profiles threat actors can create trending news and information, promote poor products, or push lies and deceptions to further an agenda. 

The application for these kinds of campaigns is vast, affecting everything from national elections to company sales and share prices, and there is currently no system in place to identify false profiles efficiently and counter the purposeful spread of misinformation in this way. 

7. Shortfall of Professionals

The final security risk on the list is the continued shortage of skilled security workers. As cybersecurity threats evolve, and areas such as information security become more important for organizational security, increasing numbers of skilled and trained professionals will be needed.

Finals Words

Many people are now desensitized to the fact their data is shared online either through breaches or loose company policies. Because we cannot regain our privacy, they often become careless about protecting it further. Add to this the constant evolution of cybersecurity threats, and the challenge for cybersecurity professionals looks like a tough one. 

To ensure organizational security, companies need a combined response, that includes continuous education of employees, restricted accesses, and multi-factor authentication. This needs to be paired with a skilled security team who are armed with the necessary knowledge and tools such as OSINT software.

Security professionals need to be able to gather real-time data on emerging threats and proactively implement an effective response.