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How Two Former Spies Cracked The $11 Billion Cyber Insurance Market
Back in November 2022, Russian computers were surreptitiously scanning American computers when they stumbled into a trap: a network of 400 virtual servers with IP addresses that appeared to belong to real companies and organizations. Except these were decoys set up by Coalition, a San Francisco–based fintech that combines one of the world’s oldest industries—insurance—with cutting-edge techniques for detecting cyberthreats. “There’s no legitimate reason anyone should try to connect to any of those servers,” says Coalition CEO and cofounder Joshua Motta, a 40-year-old former CIA analyst.
Coalition saw that the intruders were probing for the presence of MOVEit, a program used to transfer big files, often containing confidential information. It emailed four of its cyber insurance customers who had MOVEit installed on the outer perimeter of their networks, urging them to put the software behind a virtual private network.
Six months later, Progress Software, the Massachusetts company that sells MOVEit, announced it had a critical vulnerability and issued a patch. But the infamous Russian ransomware gang Clop had already exploited the flaw to burrow deep into some organizations’ networks and was sure to demand payment not to leak stolen data. Coalition scanned its customers again and saw 19, with revenue ranging from $10 million to $1 billion, were now using the program. It sent an urgent email telling them to apply the MOVEit patch. Within a month, 14 had.
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How Two Former Spies Cracked The $11 Billion Cyber Insurance Market
Fintech startups Coalition and At-Bay, founded by security and spy-agency veterans, are using their tech smarts to transform the fast-growing business of protecting companies against hackers.
www.forbes.com
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