Predicting Tomorrow: ZeroFox’s Take on the Year Ahead

2020 was a year for adaptation. Individuals and organizations alike, had to quickly assess and adapt to new, extreme situations and the effects of our ability or inability to change will be realized for years to come. It will take years for 2020 to be squarely in our rear view mirror, and we don’t know one person or company not directly affected by the pandemic. 

Last year was a challenging year for everyone. Most had to evolve to lead teams through meaningful adaptation processes. Overnight everyone’s “normal’ changed - health and human safety demanded a new level of prioritization. There was no longer a safe way to do business and live like we had prior. Rapid digital transformation, an instantaneous shift to a remote world and doing our best to survive the effects of COVID-19 gave the opportunistic agitators of the world a vast digital playing field. Although we all faced individual challenges, we also came together globally despite being further apart than ever. The truth is, although the past year was challenging, we are all stronger from what we’ve learned and continue to learn.

State of Cybersecurity

We all know that the cybersecurity market is evolving at an exponential rate; we’ve watched the industry become more saturated with new founders and new money every year. In February of 2020, at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, over 700 vendors showcased on a crowded show floor. Cyber remains a noisy market in spite of the growing need to consolidate products and solutions to meet customer requirements and solve complex risks. 

There are three fundamental pillars to meet this moment in the cyber threat landscape: collection, correlation, and disruption. Our view of the fragmented cybersecurity industry is that companies are consolidating to become good at one, or maybe two, of these buckets. In the meantime, security officers have been worn thin navigating all of the individual products, working with multiple vendors, and attempting to glue it all together into one comprehensive solution. Over 20 tools, all aimed at protecting a customer’s business assets, that don’t work together or talk to each other, simply don’t deliver. Bringing all of this together so that targeted solutions can remain focused on actionability and disruption is the key.

ZeroFox 2020 Highlights 

Amidst global economic hurdles, ZeroFox continued to gain industry recognition. Last year, ZeroFox was presented the Cyber Defense Award as a top 100 cybersecurity company and we were awarded a coveted spot in the class of 2020 Global Technology Pioneers appointed by the World Economic Forum. Our CEO also had the honor of receiving the Ernst and Young 2020 Entrepreneur of the Year Mid-Atlantic Award, a testament to the fantastic team behind the scenes every hour of every day. There’s more:

• The volume of content we collect and correlate to be able to execute disruption against adversary campaigns continues to grow. In a simple 30-day timeframe across the open internet, the ZeroFox Platform analyzed billions of pieces of content on public platforms and disrupted tens of thousands of credible threats and coordinated campaigns targeted at organizations, their employees and customer bases.
• Despite social media vendors’ slowdown in remediation times due to staff changes from the pandemic, ZeroFox efforts grew exponentially. We increased takedown submission speed and increased our product’s ability to remediate digital threats. We continue to operate at full speed, exceeding quarterly goals and retaining a near-perfect takedown acceptance rate across the open internet. 
• At ZeroFox we fundamentally believe that we are an extension of the security team and our platform’s app and integration extensions now reflect that conviction.  We have over 700 applications that can connect to the platform for augmented collection, correlation, and disruption actions to include new app connections with Slack, Zoom, Maltego, Palo Alto Networks (formerly Demisto), Splunk, and Sumo Logic.
• We have relentlessly grown our portfolio to supercharge our proactive threat intelligence services, including the acquisition of Cyveillance. The addition of over 23 years of threat intelligence and approximately 150 experienced threat researchers speaking over 27 languages now allows us to provide an additional layer of depth in analysis, investigation, and intelligence. 

ZeroFox has made it a priority to push the cyber security industry to innovate faster by enabling best-in-class Intelligence-Driven Digital Risk Protection. 

Looking Forward: Predicting Tomorrow

There will continue to be a cultural change as we remain remote much more in the future than we ever have in the past. Given this, the public attack surface has expanded exponentially, and threat actors are continually moving to take significant advantage. The growth of multi-channel attacks, Attacks-as-a-Service, Phishing Kits, and more are simply the newest iteration.

The pandemic changed our notion of cybersecurity. It has taught us that the security bubble has to follow our people wherever they are, inside or outside the office, and given new meaning to how the enterprise functions as a whole. The solution begins with all of us, collectively. We’ve gone from protecting 10-15 office buildings to over 50,000 home offices while trying to convince employees that security measures instilled at work still apply. 

As we look to 2021, we are focused on innovation and expansion to continue to meet the needs of our customers against ever-evolving threats. Take a look at our latest report with specific predictions on tactics and techniques expected to increase in 2021, what they mean to you, and how your team can prepare. ZeroFox has a renewed focus on holistic threat intelligence collection, correlation, and disruption services to offer proactive, actionable security insights. Our team remains keenly focused on improving the day-to-day operability of our customer’s security teams and their capabilities to protect and secure their most important assets and people across the internet. Our focus at ZeroFox has always been on the disruption of threats to our customers. We are doubling our efforts to enable correlation abilities even further for our customers. Our goal is to shift the external security protection paradigm from “do I have all the data” and “how are the adversaries using various platforms to target my organization” to where it needs to be to solve the challenges on the horizon: “I can now more effectively disrupt adversary efforts.”