Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In these kinds of conversations, I always ask for open problems that new entrepreneurs can solve. One of the problems that come to my mind is, I live a public life. The problem is all these fraudsters are able to access my entire LinkedIn following. I have all these LinkedIn followers who, to some degree, trust me.

I’m just using myself as a proxy. There are lots of people out there on other platforms. If the fraudsters use these brands and start phishing, that’s a very dangerous scenario. We are not doing anything to protect our followers because there’s no solution available. Even if I wanted to, I have no way of protecting my followers from this kind of phishing.

Bill Bruno: A lot of people just forget how much of our lives are readily available online. I even think back to those questionnaires that people would fill out on Facebook that people wouldn’t even realize that the questions sound a lot like the reminder questions you’d get when you didn’t remember a password. There is an opportunity there. There are a lot of people connected to you that don’t personally know you. They won’t know if it’s actually you. They don’t know your communication style.

A good example of this that just happened this week is a bunch of my friend’s co-workers received what were perceived to be text messages from him. A couple of people did respond. A couple of them recognized that it wasn’t his cadence, it wasn’t how he wrote messages. The people that didn’t know him as well responded. Lo and behold, the next thing was, “Can you buy a gift card to send to a client?” It’s obviously spam. That highlights your point. Those types of situations are really easy to prey on.

Sramana Mitra: You are solving this problem for enterprise and midmarket customers. Think about small businesses. These days, small businesses have large customer bases. There are many small businesses that have very large numbers of customers whether it’s B2C or B2B. There is no solution protecting that customer base or these individuals that I’m talking about whose names and brands can be used for fraud. I think these are significant open problems that need solutions.

Bill Bruno: It’s a good point. We founded a consulting firm and there were three of us. When you’re in a small business, you don’t have endless funds to throw at problems like that. You need better support. It’s one of the biggest problems facing businesses today.

For small businesses, my heart goes out to them as well because if they do have some sort of fraud loss, the impact of that can be extremely detrimental whereas someone from the enterprise sector can find a solution. I’m glad that it’s becoming a much more open conversation. I’m glad that governments are looking at this as well and looking at putting more ownership on brands to protect consumers. It is a battle that has to be fought on multiple fronts and there isn’t a simple solution.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4
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