New team of White Ops experts will monitor threats and offer actionable, evidence-based recommendations to help White Ops’ clients and security practitioners fight sophisticated bot attacks
February 11, 2020: White Ops, the global leader in bot mitigation, today announced the formation of the Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team, a specialized team dedicated to researching the threats and trends that organizations are facing from sophisticated bot attacks. The primary focus for the Satori team is offering data-driven, evidence-based guidance and context on investigations and actionable recommendations to responses on bot attacks for White Ops’ clients and security practitioners. Driven by a cross-functional team of leading threat intelligence analysts, data scientists, engineers, and go-to-market specialists at White Ops, the Satori team is an international unit comprised of more than 70 experts with diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
“The Satori team monitors threats and risks in order to protect White Ops’ clients, and the wider business community, as it relates to our mission,” said Tamer Hassan, co-founder and CEO of White Ops. ”It’s through the work of researchers like our new Satori team that we were able to identify 3ve and work with law enforcement to participate in the largest takedown of a botnet in history.”
Satori is a Japanese word meaning “comprehension, understanding, and awakening.” The Satori name comes from the team’s goal of bringing a new understanding to the scale, variety, and origin of the threats that sophisticated bots pose. Members of the Satori team commit to publishing primary research into corners of the bot universe that often go uncovered, with the aim of shining a light on the threats found there to demonstrate the paramount importance of the fight against sophisticated bots.
Recently, the Satori team published an investigation into the marketplaces behind “anti-detection browsers”, a collection of tools commonly used by fraudsters to carry out account takeover and credential stuffing attacks and conduct music streaming fraud. An earlier investigation into a collection of mobile applications and games uncovered an advertising fraud network with more than 4.6 million downloads.
Members of the Satori team spoke about their involvement in the initiative and what they plan to accomplish:
- “White Ops has been producing compelling research for our global customers for several years. Our goal is to ensure we have a robust knowledge base for all the malicious activity out there. This creation of the Satori team will enable us to discover and detail new threats, attack vectors, and trends in sophisticated bot activity at a rate never seen in the industry before. I am extremely eager to see what we will do as a team.” - Jonathan Tomek, Head of Threat Intelligence
- “The skills and talents present in Satori represent the ‘best of the best’ in the cyber security industry. We have former agency and military intelligence analysts, data scientists, white hat security practitioners, and advanced engineers investigating, detecting and taking down many of the most complex threats and cybercriminal organizations.” - Dimitris Theodorakis, Head of Detection
- "Our customers have come to expect excellence and creativity in complex problem solving from White Ops. The creation of Satori will deliver on that expectation in ways we can’t even predict. The scale of the challenge that sophisticated bots pose is enormous, but the research this team produces will be instrumental in helping us to protect our customers and further disrupt the economics of cybercrime." - Michael Tiffany, co-founder and President
- “The depth and breadth of the skills that Satori’s researchers have is phenomenal. From former intelligence officials to white-hat hackers to go-to-market experts and engineers, we have a wonderful luxury of a talented team and a broad bailiwick to work in. I’m eager to see what Satori produces this year and beyond.” - Dr. Russell Handorf, Principal Threat Intelligence Hacker
- "What excites me most about joining the Satori research team is the opportunity to make meaningful observations that impact our clients and the world at large. I'm especially interested in helping translate from the language of cyber threats and fraud to the language of business impacts, and I'm looking forward to helping our team explore not just the fraud models and bots in the wild, but the tangible results those threats have on the businesses they target. We have a valuable chance to keep the internet human." - Vera Nazarova, Financial Controller
- "There's an extraordinary amount of creativity at White Ops: creativity in uncovering and reverse-engineering threats on the internet, creativity in exploring new ways to tell our story, and creativity in designing the mechanisms to identify fake traffic when it shows up on your doorstep. I can't wait to see the diversity of thought that Satori's wide group of specialists is going to bring to White Ops' research, and the creative insights that we'll ultimately produce." - Joe Tallett, Manager, Detection
- "Our threat intelligence team consistently amazes me with the things they find in the wild, and our detection team devises phenomenally clever ways to prevent those threats from ensnaring our customers. The expansion of the Satori team to include go-to-market experts, specialists on business impacts, and engineers will strengthen our customer relationships by demonstrating the value of data-driven research in the fight against fraud." - Megan Baker, VP of Customer Success
Members of the Satori team will be attending the RSA Conference in San Francisco later this month at booth #2251. To learn more about White Ops’ Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team, please visit whiteops.com/satori.
