Protect your team’s personal data from exploitation
Minimize your external attack surface
Learn how Optery prevents a wide range of threats against your employees and your company.
Social Engineering Prevention
When it comes to defending your business against the varied types of social engineering attacks employed by today’s threat actors, traditional security methods like awareness training play a crucial role, but often fail against sophisticated campaigns.
Relying solely on reactive measures doesn’t effectively reduce the volume of attacks or alleviate the burden on your security team.
Since social engineering attacks require the personally identifiable information (PII) of targeted employees, proactively removing this PII from places where it can be easily accessed and exploited significantly reduces the likelihood of attacks.
This preventative approach is an essential complement to other security measures, making your employees less accessible to cybercriminals and transforming your business into a tougher target.
Spear-phishing/Whaling Prevention
Spear-phishing and whaling attacks specifically target high-value individuals within organizations, using highly personalized tactics. These cyberattacks exploit detailed knowledge about potential victims, including their personal and professional relationships.
By limiting access to such detailed information through vigilant removal from data broker sites, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of their executives and other key employees being targeted. This proactive step ensures that cybercriminals have fewer opportunities to manipulate personal information for malicious purposes.
Smishing & Vishing Risk Mitigation
Due to tightening email security measures for bulk senders, mass email phishing has become more difficult for attackers. As a result, they are increasingly relying on alternative social engineering methods like SMS-phishing (smishing) and voice-phishing (vishing).
As these attacks escalate, most enterprises aren’t sufficiently protected against voice and messaging fraud.
Proactively defending against these alternative tactics includes recognizing the essential role that exposed Personally Identifiable Information (PII) plays in these attacks and minimizing it.
By ensuring employees’ phone numbers and other personal information aren’t easily accessible to cybercriminals via data broker sites, the attack surface for this kind of fraud is significantly reduced, and the risk of your executives and other team members being targeted by phone is preemptively mitigated.
Credential Theft & Account Takeover Prevention
Data brokers facilitate access to details that can be used to compromise employee password security. Malicious actors can use the personal information found on data broker sites to potentially obtain employee passwords or reset them to take over their accounts.
The kinds of personal details compiled and sold by data brokers can help cybercriminals answer login security questions. In the wrong hands, such information becomes the means for Account Takeover (ATO).
Cybercriminals can also use data brokers to acquire employee email addresses and phone numbers. This info can be used to send impersonation emails from trusted sources to trick employees into revealing their login details. Credential harvesting, a common method of threat actors, utilizes techniques like mass phishing and smishing attacks, and spoofed websites, to acquire credentials from multiple victims.
Today’s attackers aren’t hesitating to target a wider range of employees, often leveraging information from data broker sites. This reality underscores the importance of securing personal data across an organization’s population, not only for a select few, to protect against credential theft and ATO.
Attack Surface Management
Today’s enterprise attack surfaces have expanded well beyond traditional boundaries, encompassing exposed personal information across a vast array of data brokers online.
Every exposed employee profile represents an external ‘attack surface’ that can be exploited in any number of ways to breach organizations. While businesses have focused on securing the attack surface within their own environments, they have historically overlooked the attack surface that exists outside of their perimeter. The result is that the external attack surface, made up of employee personal data, has been the one attackers most often exploit.
With employee PII readily available on the internet, attackers can use this information to craft convincing messages that trick company personnel into handing over their credentials, wiring funds, downloading ransomware & malware, or performing some other harmful task. Without access to PII, it is more difficult for attackers to craft convincing messages and contact targets directly.
Optery’s patented search technology finds more exposed personal profiles than anyone, including Google. As a result, we are also able to remove more profiles and therefore more effectively reduce your organization’s external attack surface.
Employee Privacy Protection
Securing employee personal data is crucial for maintaining workplace integrity and trust. As personal and professional boundaries often overlap in today’s environment, a breach of employee data can quickly escalate into a corporate crisis.
Proactively removing employee information from data brokers safeguards against potential risks and liabilities. This approach enhances compliance with privacy regulations and fosters a workplace culture that values respect and security. By ensuring the privacy of their personal information, employees can focus more effectively on their work, boosting productivity and engagement.
Identity Theft Risk Reduction
Identity theft poses a profound risk not just to individuals but to the entire infrastructure of a business. When employee identities are compromised, the repercussions can ripple throughout the entire organization, leading to unauthorized access and fraudulent activities.
Proactive removal of employees’ personal information from data brokers mitigates this risk, securing not only the individual’s identity but also protecting the organization’s assets and sensitive information from unauthorized access and misuse.
Doxing, Harassment, & Physical Threat Risk Mitigation
The exposure of personal information like home addresses poses a significant security risk, potentially leading to doxing, harassment, and even physical violence.
Particularly at risk are high-profile executives and frontline workers who may face real-world confrontations. By proactively scrubbing such sensitive information from data broker sites, businesses protect their staff from such threats, thereby maintaining a safer, more secure working environment.
Cyber Attack Prevention/ Defensive Cyber Counterintelligence
According to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, the pre-attack phase of a cyberattack involves adversaries conducting reconnaissance to gather information about their targets.
This includes not only organizational details but also employee personal information, which is frequently exploited for social engineering, credential theft, and initial access. By removing this employee PII from data brokers, organizations significantly limit the information available to potential attackers, making it more difficult for them to successfully target employees and, ultimately, the company itself.
This kind of defensive cyber counterintelligence serves as an essential means to prevent espionage and cyber attacks.
Insider Threat Prevention
Insider threats pose a significant risk to organizations, not only from malicious insiders but also from well-intentioned employees who may be manipulated by external threat actors.
Cybercriminals can exploit personal information obtained from data brokers to socially engineer employees, gaining their trust by leveraging private details not commonly known. This familiarity can lead to unauthorized disclosures of sensitive company information or even unintentional assistance in a cyber attack.
Sensitive personal information available through data brokers can also be used for more sinister forms of manipulation, such as blackmail. Employees who fear exposure of their personal details may be coerced into providing access to restricted company resources or performing actions that compromise security.
Proactively removing personal information from data brokers and public databases mitigates these risks by ensuring that cybercriminals have less ammunition to leverage against your employees. This measure helps to fortify your organization’s defenses against complex insider threat scenarios.
Protection Against Business Email Compromise (BEC)
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks exploit the familiarity and trust within a company, often using personal and professional information gleaned from data brokers to impersonate executives or other key personnel.
These sophisticated scams can lead to significant financial losses and damage to corporate integrity. Optery’s data removal services play a crucial role in preventing such breaches by limiting the information available to cybercriminals, making it more challenging for them to craft believable deceptive communications. Ensuring that less personal data is publicly accessible reduces the overall risk of BEC attacks, protecting both the company’s finances and its reputation.
Reducing Spam and Targeted Advertising
By removing employee details from data broker sites, businesses can significantly reduce the volume of spam and targeted advertising their employees receive.
This reduction not only minimizes distractions and enhances workplace productivity but also protects against potential phishing attacks, which often hide within such communications. Limiting access to personal information makes it harder for cybercriminals to target employees with sophisticated scams, thereby safeguarding both individual and organizational data security.