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114 points BenjaminN | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.501s | 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!

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ttul ◴[] No.22676728[source]
This is a hot area, but there are already huge competitors. How do you differentiate?
replies(1): >>22676796 #
BenjaminN ◴[] No.22676796[source]
Great question!

1. From Gophish: you need to be technical and you need at least a week off to prepare the attacks. With Riot, you can be sending attacks in a matter of minutes.

2. From Knowbe4, …: those are products made for enterprise companies, that are trying somehow to adapt to smaller companies. Riot is doing the opposite: it was built with smaller companies in mind.

Overall, I think there's a huge need today for product-centric cybersecurity companies, where most of the big players are sales-centric companies.

replies(2): >>22678584 #>>22686569 #
1. ttul ◴[] No.22686569[source]
So, to summarize, it's phishing training for small companies. Makes sense.