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114 points BenjaminN | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.974s | source

Ahoy Hacker News! I'm Ben, founder of Riot (https://tryriot.com), a tool that sends phishing emails to your team to get them ready for real attacks. It's like a fire drill, but for cybersecurity.

Prior to Riot, I was the co-founder and CTO of a fintech company operating hundred of millions of euros of transactions every year. We were under attack continuously. I was doing an hour-long security training once a year, but was always curious if my team was really ready for an attack. In fact, it kept me up at night thinking we were spending a lot of money on protecting our app, but none on preparing the employees for social engineering.

So I started a side project at that previous company to test this out. On the first run, 9% of all the employees got scammed. I was pissed, but it convinced me we needed a better way to train employees for cybersecurity attacks. This is what grew into Riot.

For now we are only training for phishing, but our intention is to grow this into a tool that will continuously prepare your team for good practices (don't reuse passwords for example) and upcoming attacks (CEO fraud is next), in a smart way.

Your questions, feedback, and ideas are most welcome. Would love to hear your war stories on phishing scams, and how you train your teams!

1. eggbrain ◴[] No.22676964[source]
How do you work with the service providers you use to host your platform and send out emails (e.g. Heroku / Mailgun) to let them know you are not a malicious phishing company, but an anti-phishing company?

I say this because I ended up reporting the phishing email I received from you guys to Mailgun, and I believe accidentally got your account disabled. Sorry about that.

replies(2): >>22677005 #>>22681609 #
2. BenjaminN ◴[] No.22677005[source]
YES you did!

I called them just right after that, and I have to say they've been great so far. We agreed I would pay for a dedicated IP, and they now fully support Riot. And having a dedicated IP is actually better, because you can now remove the unexpected warning on Gmail.

replies(2): >>22680192 #>>22680660 #
3. jujodi ◴[] No.22680192[source]
This is amazing. As long as none of your "unsuspecting" "victims" notice you have a dedicated IP lol
4. mike_d ◴[] No.22680660[source]
Your dedicated IP is going to get flagged as more and more users report it. I run phishing as part of red team exercises and have a constant need for new fresh IPs.
5. ackbar03 ◴[] No.22681609[source]
If you reported their email you probably passed the test anyways