We’re throttling up and feeling the g-force at Allure Security this week with a just closed $10 million Series A funding round. With the backing of Curql and a stellar group of investors, we’re still laser-focused on our vision for a safer internet for financial transactions and commerce – where fraud is stopped upstream before a single person falls victim. This milestone supports the expansion of our presence to protect many more brands and their customers from all kinds of nastiness online.

Phishing is Not Slowing Down

The challenge we face is daunting. Adversaries impersonating trusted parties in attempts to steal credentials, money, and identities is a problem that only continues to grow in volume and sophistication. 

Over the course of 2023, the Anti-Phishing Working Group observed almost five million phishing attacks resulting in the group flagging 2023 as “the worst year for phishing on record.” Our own data suggests the trend is not only continuing into 2024 but escalating. We detected 25% more online brand impersonation attacks in February 2024 over January 2024, and that’s a 56% increase over February 2023.

This is not a matter of fraudsters repeatedly targeting the same organizations with an increasing number of impersonations. They’re broadening their target pool and impersonating an expanding list of brands. Corroborating this fact is our count of brands impersonated in just the first two months of 2024 surging 31% compared to the entire three months of Q1 2023. Fake websites, deceptive social media accounts, and rogue mobile apps plague companies large-and-small.

In addition, threats involving misrepresentation, impersonation, etc. are growing more sophisticated. Fraudsters are some of the first to leverage the latest technology. We’ve seen examples of adversaries using generative AI to impersonate executives on a video call and siphon $25 million from a Hong Kong company. Custom versions of ChatGPT on OpenAI’s GPTs marketplace impersonate celebrities and well-known brands.  

Legacy Approaches Aren’t Working, Allure Security is Changing the Game

Traditional approaches to reactively addressing spoofs online don’t cut it anymore. These scams cost businesses and consumers time and money related to direct fraud costs, reimbursement, increased call volume, and response costs, but they also chip away at the trust and reputation brands work so hard to establish and maintain.

Here’s where Allure Security stands apart – while legacy approaches react, Allure Security actually preempts. 

We bring the big guns – bleeding edge AI-powered detection and what we consider to be the best response/takedown team in the business. We automate the evaluation of more of the internet – tens-of-millions of digital assets each day – using computer vision and natural language processing to evaluate every newly registered or active domain, not to mention the suspicious sites we continually re-evaluate to note any recently surfaced indicators of impersonation.

This is what allows us to find more online brand impersonations closer to their inception than do-it-yourself approaches or competing vendors.

Not only is our breadth of coverage unparalleled, so too is our three-pronged approach to responding to online scams consisting of:

1. First, quickly blocklisting the offending content with major web browsers, internet service providers, anti-virus vendors and more
2. Second, we flood any credential harvesters with realistic yet useless log-in credentials which hampers a scam’s business model and efficiency
3. Third, our uncompromising, mission-driven response team staffed by former U.S. Military Special Forces members delivers some of the highest takedown success rates and fastest times-to-takedown in the industry

We’ve become the go-to for online brand protection-as-a-service. We currently hold the position of top-rated vendor in the Gartner Peer Insights brand protection software category, and have gained the trust of brands worldwide. Our commitment to service excellence is unmatched, and we’re only getting stronger.

If you’ve never experienced Allure Security online brand protection-as-a-service for yourself or it’s been a while, request a demo to see firsthand how we’re setting a new standard in online brand protection.

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