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114 points BenjaminN | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. Kkoala ◴[] No.22678053[source]
Seems to be a hot topic recently. I first discovered https://www.hoxhunt.com/, there are probably some other competitors as well, what makes you different?
replies(1): >>22678376 #
2. tomashertus ◴[] No.22678376[source]
I would be interesting in this answer as well. There is actually quite heave competition in this space: PhishMe, PhishLabs, IronScales, MediaPro, KnowBe4, Wombat (acquired by ProofPoint).

What convinced YC to invest in your company?

replies(1): >>22683757 #
3. thejournalizer ◴[] No.22683757[source]
Not OP, but I will say, of those companies, only two or so really focus on this as the market is incredibly saturated. For example, Attack Simulator via Microsoft was recently announced, and their O365 brand is one of the most abused. Most have acquired other organizations to find higher ground.