I spent the early part of my cybersecurity career as an ethical hacker. Banks, casinos, professional sports franchises, and other prestigious clients hired me to test their security, and I was pretty good at it. Over time I came to realize that the most reliable approach to breaching sophisticated defenses was to manipulate the human element, also known as social engineering, so this became my focus. Using mostly social engineering techniques I was able to gain access to sensitive areas and networks time after time, year after year, often against the same clients. It was lucrative, but it was also frustrating. Organizations were simply not learning from the vulnerabilities I was exposing. I knew there had to be a better way to educate people on how to deal with the social engineering threat. That’s why I founded Phishfirewall, to apply my hunter’s perspective to devising a system to teach people how to protect their organizations against people like me.
Starting with my understanding that social engineering is a human-centric issue, our approach has been to rigorously ground our education content and delivery strategies on key principles from psychology and the behavioral & learning sciences. We then use AI to automate, individualize, and humanize our turnkey platform using multiple patents on AI implementation of behavioral science concepts, with more on the way. In short, we use sophisticated technology to produce something simple, elegant, and easy to use. Phishfirewall’s learning experience platform is quite simply the best performing and most user-friendly defense against ransomware and other cyber threats targeting your personnel.