The Crucial Role of Executive Protection in Safeguarding Leaders

Brian Thompson, the American CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot in New York City while walking to an investors' meeting. The assailant ambushed him outside a hotel, firing multiple shots and hitting Thompson in the back and leg in what law enforcement are describing as a premeditated targeted attack.

The incident sent shockwaves through the global business community, and underscores the growing dangers faced by high-profile executives.

With increasing societal tensions and heightened visibility through media, CEOs and other leaders are becoming prime targets for threats ranging from physical harm to cyberattacks. This alarming reality highlights the essential need for professional executive protection services.

As a leader in this field, Signal provides tailored solutions to safeguard individuals and their families in an unpredictable world.

Rising Risks for Corporate Leaders

Wealth, decision-making power, and public recognition make executives attractive targets for people holding personal grievances or extremist beliefs seeking financial gain, revenge, or notoriety. Threats can manifest in multiple forms, including:

• Physical Attacks: Executives often travel to unfamiliar locations, attend high-profile events, and interact with diverse individuals—all increasing their exposure to danger.

• Cyber Threats: Digital profiles and personal data can be exploited for blackmail or identity theft.

• Online Threats: Online death threats to VIPs can precede offline physical attacks.

• Harassment: Cyberstalking, fixated individuals, and gender-based harassment can often be found online with aggressive language, extremely negative sentiment, dehumanizing rhetoric, and hate speech.

• Reputation Risks: Public figures are under constant scrutiny, where even minor missteps can lead to severe reputational damage.

The killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO serves as a sobering reminder that even those at the pinnacle of corporate power are not immune to these risks.

For example, another crucial aspect of reducing risk for executives is monitoring the broader societal response following an incident. In the aftermath of recent events, "wanted" posters targeting healthcare executives have appeared across New York City, accompanied by a surge of online commentary endorsing the violence. While these reactions may not constitute direct threats, they reflect a hostile climate that could escalate without warning.

What Is Executive Protection?

Executive protection encompasses a comprehensive suite of security measures designed to mitigate risks and ensure the safety of leaders and their families.

Core elements include:

1. Risk Assessment: Identifying potential vulnerabilities through robust evaluations.

2. Personal Security: Close protection officers trained to manage real-time threats.

3. Travel Security: Planning and monitoring travel itineraries to ensure safe passage.

4. Cybersecurity: Safeguarding personal and professional digital profiles.

5. Emergency Response: Rapid interventions to neutralize immediate dangers.

Why Signal is a Trusted Leader in Executive Protection

Signal is designed to equip security professionals with real-time data and actionable insights. These tools enhance the capabilities of dedicated security teams by enabling proactive threat detection and response, ensuring executives and organizations remain protected in an increasingly complex risk environment.

• Real-Time Intelligence

Signal’s cutting-edge tools monitor and analyze publicly available information, delivering actionable insights to preempt potential risks. This proactive approach ensures executives stay one step ahead of threats.

• Customized Insight

Recognizing that no two executives face identical risks, using Signal, Executive Protection teams can offer personalized protection plans customized to an executive’s requirements.

The Broader Implications of Executive Protection

Investing in executive protection has benefits that go beyond personal safety. It:

• Preserves Business Continuity: Ensures leaders can focus on their responsibilities without fear.

• Upholds Reputation: Prevents incidents that could harm the public image of both the executive and the organization.

• Provides Peace of Mind: A secure environment fosters confidence and productivity.

Lessons from the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Tragedy

The loss of a prominent leader reverberates throughout industries, highlighting the need for proactive safety measures. As corporate responsibilities grow more complex, so do the risks. Businesses must recognize that the safety of their leaders is not a luxury but a necessity.

Signal

Signal is an advanced intelligence platform designed to proactively identify and provide insight to help mitigate risks to high-profile individuals and organizations. By leveraging real-time data from social media, news outlets, the dark and deep web and other open-source intelligence channels, the Signal delivers actionable insights to enhance executive protection.

This system enables teams to anticipate threats, monitor potential vulnerabilities, and respond swiftly to incidents.

By incorporating Signal into their security protocols, organizations can ensure comprehensive situational awareness and improved safety for executives. Learn more about Signal and the Global Feed here.

Take Action Today

In an uncertain world, executive protection is no longer optional. Signal’s expertise ensures that corporate leaders and their families can live and work securely. The tragic event involving the UnitedHealthcare CEO serves as a stark reminder of what’s at stake. Don’t wait for a crisis to act—reach out to Signal today to build a robust security framework.

Learn more about Signal’s services at Signal Executive Protection.

Global Feed - Risk Identification and Mitigation

Every day, Global Feed detects and publishes over 6,000 real-time situation reports on incidents occurring worldwide that could be impacting your organization and personnel. Our proprietary system processes millions of data points, aggregating and analysing all relevant information about an incident, cross-referencing the information with trusted sources, to deliver timely, accurate, and comprehensive situation reports. Best of all, Global Feed is New Zealand owned and operated, ensuring that you have the best possible local coverage!

How Global Feed works

Global Feed provides real-time alerts for a wide range of incidents, including shootings, explosions, stabbings, traffic collisions, infrastructure collapses, cyber incidents, port closures, and power outages. The data feed also tracks natural disasters, outbreaks, hazardous material, fires, and extreme weather events. Furthermore, potential disruptions such as riots and strikes can also be monitored, ensuring that you are informed of hazards that are impacting your organization's safety, operations, and logistics on a global scale.

Global Feed features

• Filter by incidents by category, location, keywords, confidence level, and date range.

• Set-up email alerts based on any combination of filters, or trigger notifications based on geo-fence proximity to your assets.

• Subscribe to regular tailored briefs to stay informed on key regional security trends and developments.

Example use cases

A major New Zealand company uses Global Feed to alert them to security incidents near their assets, or potentially disrupting or harming their supply chain, personal, or interests.

On Tuesday evening, the security manager receives an email alert that an explosion has occurred at Murray Bay within 2km of their CEO’s house. After reviewing the situation report, the manager knows that the explosion occurred at the beach nearby and that police/ambulance are on route – after a quick review, of the underlying source material, the manager proactively calls the CEO to apprise them of the situation and check that they are okay.

Over the weekend, the security manager receives an email alert that large demonstration will be occurring at Parliament across the road from their Wellington office. While not targeting their organisation, the manager is able to inform local staff of the potential disruption and to take necessary security precautions.

Screengrabs of Global Feed interface

How Global Feed can help your organisation

Do you need real-time alerts when a shooting or explosion occurs near one of your offices?

Would you like to be notified if your supply chain is disrupted by road closures, port strikes, or bridge collapses? Are you concerned natural disasters might disrupt your CEO’s travel plans?

Do you want to stay ahead of major incidents that could impacting your employee’s safety?

If you answered yes to any of these, it’s time to consider Global Feed. Stay informed, stay ahead, and protect your assets with our comprehensive, real-time incident detection.

The Role of AI in OSINT: Introducing New Briefer Tool

Open source intelligence (OSINT) has transformed in recent years, following the explosion of data and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), effectively hallmarking a new era of security support solutions.

AI-driven OSINT tools excel in collecting and analysing publicly available information from diverse online sources. We’re excited to be at the forefront of this new era, announcing a new feature within our latest version of Signal, Briefer, designed to reduce repetitive tasks for security teams, streamline processes and make hunting out threats faster and easier.

Artificial intelligence and open source, a powerful match

There is a  growing demand for solutions that improve efficiency and enable teams to quickly track and research vast data across the web and social media. Top players in the market have been identified as those that can provide expert analysis and interpretation of the data they collect, identifying patterns and trends, and sifting genuine threats from noise.

In addition, while AI and machine learning has been used in security processes for more than a decade, with the rise of generative AI and tools such as ChatGPT, AI has reached a new level of usability of everyday security staff, with clever and widely functional use cases showcasing the power of the technology.

In our digital age, AI models are now able to meet the scale of the open data landscape, so instead of an insurmountable challenge it becomes a goldmine of information to be analysed. As a result, security teams are greatly empowered, and the business and its people benefit from being one step ahead of threats.

Breaking down the role of AI in OSINT, and introducing Briefer

As highlighted by Oxford Internet Institute, “AI can also assist the analysis phase of the OSINT cycle, generating valuable intelligence based on pre-trained models and thus countering the information overload problem faced by intelligence analysts.”

With the help of AI, pages upon pages of public web information can be scoured, as the intelligent solution sifts through mentions, news and opinions to flag potential threats, sharing a selection of alerts with a human team. 

In addition, in the case of Signal’s new tool Briefer, reporting becomes simplified and more consistent. The AI algorithm enables teams to select various components for their report, and create it instantly for key stakeholders.

At its core, AI is improving OSINT in three ways. That is, improving data collection, developing data analysis, and generating actionable insights. This includes assisting in the prioritisation of data, correlating relevant information, reviewing raw information, and deriving relevant insights with key tags so human analysts can sift through alerts.

As we are already seeing, emerging technologies, including AI, don’t replace the role of the security team, but have the potential to greatly enhance it, saving time throughout the whole process, from hunting for threats to reporting on potential disturbances.

A new phase of security intelligence

Launching Briefer into Signal’s security solution is an exciting next step for the platform, and it highlights the budding potential of where AI is headed and where it is today.

It also shows how AI-enhanced OSINT can become an integral security resource, not to replace human analysts, but provide a foundation of efficiency and insight so they can focus more time and attention on securing the business and its people.

Review our latest product updates and book in for a free demo.

Threat intelligence climbs into the billions - and a special 10-year anniversary update

The need for threat intelligence solutions continues to rise as security leaders need to sift threats from noise and increasingly safeguard their organisation and people from online threats.

At Signal, after a decade providing leading threat intelligence solutions to a wide range of industries, we’ve seen the genuine impact digital risk management can offer in supporting the safety, security, and operational resilience of organizations.

Whether in banking, healthcare, insurance, utilities, manufacturing or entertainment, being able to monitor online data, including the dark web, can go a long way in identifying any threats to your people or daily operations, and respond quickly as needed. As technology advances so can our means of stopping threats in their tracks.

Threat intelligence market as booming market - and we can see why

In 2022, the global threat intelligence market Fortune Business Insights size is expected to experience a boom, reaching US$18.11 billion (NZ$30.6 billion).

During this forecast period, the Asia Pacific market is expected to grow significantly as security leaders seek to enhance their resilience.

Our threat environment is more complex and dynamic than ever before – rising geo-political tensions, devastating natural disasters, cyber-attacks, and the growing threat posed by violent extremism and a multitude of other drivers presents security leaders with significant challenges. Particularly amidst growing talent and skill shortages leaving security teams time poor and burnt out.

On a positive note, artificial intelligence (AI) is greatly advancing organisational resilience, particularly through centralising threat intelligence. In fact, recent market research has found that 69% of enterprises see AI as a necessary investment for responding to cyber-attacks, and 51% of executives see cyber threat detection as the use primary case for AI.

With effective threat intelligence that leverages emerging technologies, businesses can make use of one platform to monitor threat data from a wide array of data sources and formats. They can aggregate all relevant data from across the web and make it easily understandable, vastly improving the ability to mitigate risk.

Responding to a growing need - introducing Signal Version 4

Over our decade in the threat intelligence industry, we’ve always been user-led. As part of our commitment to Signal users, we’ve placed the majority of our focus and resources into providing updates and solutions to our platform that are in direct response to how people are using our services and tools.

Signal Version 4 is a culmination of months of deep-diving into how we can best improve and advance our services to cater for our modern, digital, and increasingly AI-driven business world.

This is a major update to the existing service, and also provides a new foundation to allow us to build out our powerful AI functionality, along with ongoing full-service updates. Behind the scenes we’ve been building, testing, reiterating and smoothing out both the underlying solution infrastructure and the topline view, to ensure utmost resiliency and usability.

While we’re excited for our users, new and existing, to try it out themselves, we’re most excited about our AI additions, improved user interface, data visualisation capability, customisable dashboards, and global event detection and alerting.

While security teams are up against notable challenges, with clever, user-led threat intelligence tooling we can prepare for the worst, catch risks that arise, and respond in kind.

Review the latest updates and book in for a free demo.

Understanding risk: Is social media doing more harm than good?

Online conversations, powered largely by social media platforms but also taking place in dark corners of the web, are increasingly risky not only for the reputation of a business but their very livelihood. This growing area of risk must be adequately considered and catered for, with tooling and systems put in place to mitigate fallout and stop damaging discussions going too far.

The unprecedented impact of social media

In today’s world, social media has become woven into the fabric of our daily lives, used to communicate, engage with content, and influence opinion. However, what began as a light-hearted way for people to share with others now has the potential to boost or destroy a business or brand in rapid time.

With the ability to amplify messages instantly and magnify their reach across millions of users, social media possesses a great ability to influence public opinion, brand perception, and overall business success. In today’s day and age, reputations can be made or broken with a single viral post or inaccurate reporting. And it’s not just social media, with discussions on the dark or deep web also having damaging impacts far and wide.

When seemingly innocuous actions or comments snowball they can lead to financial losses, legal entanglements, or even a business having to close its doors. Increasingly, business leaders at organisations of all sizes and industries are grappling with the complexities of the online landscape, as they look to safeguard their reputation and operations. 

When the impossible becomes reality

The recent Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) story that made global headlines is a real-life example of the worst case scenario of this issue playing out.

The largest United States bank to fail since Washington Mutual closed its doors in 2008, the story is particularly noteworthy due to the role social media played in its downfall. The Santa Clara bank was shut down in March of this year by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, after the company’s investments decreased in value massively and quickly.

With reported assets of $209 billion in December 2022, the bank had grown significantly between 2019 and 2022, but this wasn’t enough for mismanagement of investment and growing vulnerabilities. While various factors were at play in the demise of the bank, arguably the final straw was when many people withdrew large amounts of money in the span of a few hours, driven by social media discussions. 

At the beginning of March, social media accounts began reporting on SBV’s financial health, prompting customers to pull $1 million per second from their accounts, as reported by Reuters. Overall, depositors withdrew $42 billion from the bank in 10 hours, leading to SBV CEO Greg Becker later blaming social media as a top factor in the bank’s downfall.

Responding to risk before it’s too late

While this is an extreme example, the principle of the SBV story must be considered and acted upon. Businesses from all industries, not just finance, need to pay attention to their social media presence, and the impact it may have, and take a proactive approach to risks. 

In order to catch negative discussions or commentary before it goes too far, powerful tooling and human resources is an imperative investment. As the SBV story shows us, failure to put preventative and response strategies in place can leave businesses up for more than reputational damage.

The world of social media is ever-evolving, and with it the risks businesses face. By understanding the impact of social media on business risk, we can unlock the potential for growth and success, while safeguarding against the perils that lurk in the virtual world.

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Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo.

How to safeguard yourself online in the Digital Age

In a world powered by digital devices, where social media enables us to share widely and rapidly, our personal information is more vulnerable than ever. As we spend more time online, and with malicious activity now commonplace, it’s crucial to take the time to understand how to protect our information.

When security solutions aren’t enough

With threats continually on the rise, there’s a good reason why cybersecurity solutions that protect digital identities have skyrocketed in recent years, but even these solutions can’t stand in the place of simple and necessary best practices to protect you and your information.

Adequately safeguarding your online identity may feel daunting but it doesn’t have to be. Combining a healthy dose of common sense with tips and tricks acquired over years in the industry has led us to understand the important building blocks of a strong foundation of security. This foundation requires us to get back to the basics, implementing best practices and behaviours, and leveraging security solutions when necessary.

Recognising the need for real world, practical advice and steps to take to safeguard your online identity, our Intelligence Analysts have  published a whitepaper on this very topic, drawing on their  expertise to share pivotal insights into operational security and privacy in the age of social media. 

The whitepaper covers several common vulnerabilities and sources of exposure, with tangible, practical recommendations to minimise the vulnerability of your online presence, so you can enjoy the benefits of social media without the fallout.

Breaking it down to get to the core vulnerability

In the whitepaper, we lay out how to develop good habits that improve your identity security and limit the ability to assess and exploit personal information. We cover what may seem obvious and that which you may never have considered before, and share resources and insights to help you on your journey to a safer online presence.

For instance, have you ever considered the potential vulnerability of your usernames and profile URLs? Utilising the same username, or variants, across multiple platforms enables a threat actor to identify your online profiles which they can leverage for an attack.

OSINT, which stands for open-source intelligence, is the means of gathering information with automatic or manual means, from public sources, including the deep and dark web and  websites. While the practice itself is fully legal, leveraging only public information, this can then be used for more nefarious means. The OSINT community is known to use free script-based username enumeration tools to search across hundreds or thousands of websites for accounts or URLs featuring a specific username.

In order to address this issue, we offer various suggestions. For one, avoid using your full real name for online accounts wherever possible. You could decide on a pseudonym or simply use your first name. Another top tip is when a platform allows users to customise your profile URL, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, you can edit the default URL to include randomised characters, a pseudonym or a misspelt variant of your name.

Understanding and stopping the threat against your personal information

In our whitepaper we go much more in depth into how we can and should be protecting your online identity. Other key topics we cover include privacy settings, public profile details, data breaches and passwords, personal data aggregators, and the role of family and friends.

We’ve been doing this work long enough to see the unfortunate reality of how seemingly small vulnerabilities can lead to bigger issues. While it can still be unlikely for anything untoward to take place, it’s better to take the time to tighten up security best practices and improve your safety overall.

Click here to download a full copy of the whitepaper.

Executive threats spike following pandemic - what can be done?

For as long as there have been executives there have been executive threats. It’s the unfortunate lay of the land that the bigger the name or the more airtime an executive has, the more likely that they’ll be the recipient of various threats.

Over the years, the number of threats against executives in online environments has grown, ranging from death threats and hate speech right through to doxings and attacks against an executives’ private residences. In more extreme cases, attacks extend from executives alone to include their family or loved ones.

With such threats increasingly common, it’s imperative for organisations to protect their people in real-time, catching risks before any damage is done, and gaining better peace of mind overall.

Threats grow following pandemic and topical issues

As branding has evolved, the role of executives has also transformed. Leaders today have become the face of a business, and are more likely to speak out not only about the business they represent but topical issues such as the pandemic or climate change. Even not speaking out can be seen as a failing on the part of the organisation. Overall, with a bigger spotlight comes more attention - good and bad.

Recent studies have highlighted the rise in executive threats, highlighting that employees in U.S. companies stated their CEO received physical threats after taking (58%) or not taking (40%) a position on a racial or political issue. Overall, 35% said there was growing concern about extremists, with a lot of this activity tied to larger issues. In addition, the pandemic witnessed a massive increase in executive threats, with physical attacks more prevalent.

The above example has been censored to remove identifiable features

Keeping executives safe in the face of extremists

If security teams are to adequately face these threats head on, they must gain a more thorough picture of what people are saying, plotting, or bragging about in order to ensure risks can be intercepted and executives, as well as their loved ones, can stay safe. It’s important to know what’s going on in public forums for discussion, such as Twitter, as well as more nefarious corners of the internet, such as the dark web.

Recognising the need for increased security measures, open source intelligence gathering forms a critical aspect of increased situational awareness and risk mitigation for advanced executive protection.

Signal provides open source intelligence that enables security teams to effectively monitor and analyse open source data available and use targeted searches to gain more in-depth situational awareness. Leveraging this intelligence enables security teams to objectively evaluate current security challenges, and launch risk-mitigation measures.

All we know for sure is in today’s day and age we need to remain as vigilant as possible, catching threats before they turn into something more sinister. While every organisation needs a master plan, they also need tools and effective security intelligence that will make that plan a functional, daily practice.

Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo.

Save your reputation before it’s too late - why it’s important to protect your name

One misstep in today’s competitive business world can be enough to lose customers and employees. Today, reputation is everything. Coinciding with this is a rapid increase in online events that have the sole intention of damaging an organisation’s reputation. 

In such a reality, being able to access and gain insights from actionable, real-time data will put you one step ahead of the game and help mitigate any destructive forces against your reputation.

Why reputation matters

In 2020, Weber Shandwick, a leading global communications and marketing solutions firm, found that on average global executives attribute 63% of their company’s market value on their overall reputation.

On top of this, we now live in a world where the vast majority of consumers will research a brand before they commit to buying a product or service. A company’s digital presence, and the reputation of its brand and staff, factors into this decision-making process, determining whether the company in question is an optimum choice or not.

In fact, analysts at IDC have stated that one of the current key pillars of brand and reputation resilience is customer trust and loyalty. Customers, partners and suppliers use enterprise response to crises to measure the quality and integrity of an organisation and its leadership, the analysts state.

Events that can have an adverse impact on a company’s reputation includes conversations or false information about executive behaviour, environmental footprint or damage, political donations, societal issues, allegations of unethical practices, or employee safety.

The above example has been censored to remove identifiable features

Catching the problem before it snowballs

While preventative measures are always a good idea, as it stands it's impossible to catch everything before it's released into the world. Recent years have seen the rise of malicious attacks on everything from CEOs to SEO results, all with the intention of making a company look bad or perform poorly.

Using open source intelligence gathering tools like Signal offers multi-faceted help against such issues. When it comes to reputation, Signal can alert users to any mention of specific terms or names. This includes attacks against a company, any C-suite personnel, or discussions online about a current or potential attack on operations.

We highlighted this in action in our blog Black Hat Brags About Bank Hack - Signal Could Have Spotted It. In this example, Capital One, one of the biggest banks in the United States, discovered it had been hacked after a ‘white hat’ noticed the cyber criminals bragging about the breach - four months after the initial incident. The configuration vulnerability that the hacker had exploited was located and rectified, but not after approximately 100 million people in the US and 6 million in Canada were impacted.

Signal could have caught the issue immediately. Our machine learning driven relevancy engine can draw an analyst’s attention towards critical incidents amidst thousands of irrelevant posts. We scan the web and dark web for chat about data hacks, breaches and stolen information. Monitoring multiple data sources, we can provide real-time results and feed this back to your organisation so you can take practical steps to deal with an incident that could cause reputational damage immediately, before your brand is impacted. Proactive alerts can be activated via email, SMS, our mobile app or through one of the many integrations available.

Ultimately, reputation can spell the difference between your company’s success or a massive stumbling block. Uncovering what people are saying about you can highlight the potential negative impact of malicious keyboard warriors and give you the chance to respond, and it can uncover more sinister threats against your business. Regardless of the specifics, the power of visibility can’t be understated, and that’s exactly what we’re proud to offer.

Contact Signal to learn more or schedule a demo.

How Do We Help Combat Online Stalking and Harassment? By Watching the Web

The Impact of Online Stalking, Threats and Harassment

In March 2022, Apple and its CEO Tim Cook finally got a court to enforce a restraining order against a mentally disturbed stalker who falsely claimed to be married to Cook, tried to set up fake companies under Cook’s and Apple’s names, and sent Cook pictures of guns and ammunition.

The stalker, Julie Lee Choi, was never jailed.

It was doubly worrying for Cook and Apple, because two years ago, the company was granted a restraining order against Rakesh Sharma, who visited Cook's house twice and threatened him, as stated in court documents.

Again, Sharma wasn’t imprisoned – leaving Apple with costs of $USD630,000 to pay for Cook’s security. That cost was just for 2021 alone.

There is an increasing trend of people online threatening to kill, maim, rob or blow up those they dislike – sometimes adding the words “In Minecraft, that is” or “In Call of Duty, of course” to try create plausible deniability.

The stalkers, threatener and harassers all leave plenty of activity on the web. If we use the right tool to cut through internet chatter and zero in on the threats, we can pre-empt the worst outcomes.

But how did this come to be– and how do we know which harmful online trends will have real-world consequences? 

The Costs and Consequences of Internet-Driven Harm

According to Forbes, since March 2020, global internet usage has soared by 50-70% in most countries due to lockdowns keeping people inside and angry and internet-capable devices becoming ubiquitous.

The company Cybersecurity Ventures estimates the cost of internet-derived harm as having risen past $3 trillion USD in 2015 to an expected $USD 10.5 trillion in 2025. The basis? Hostile nation-state sponsored and organized crime gang hacking activities, damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm.

Online activity’s real-world consequences are sometimes financial, sometimes reputational, sometimes against individuals, and sometimes against corporations.

For example:

• In 2021, a Massachusetts-based supervisor at eBay was sent to prison after he was found to have cyber-stalked – and harassed in the real world – online critics of the company. The supervisor was sentenced to 18 months in prison for cyber-stalking a couple critical of the company who published an online newsletter that covered eBay and other companies. The victims were sent disturbing packages including a preserved pig fetus and a book on dealing with the loss of a spouse. Ten other employees were charged in relation to the case – severely embarrassing eBay.

• In early May 2022, DGL Group's chief executive Simon Henry made personal comments about celebrity chef Nadia Lim which were sensationalized by social media commentators and opinion columnists, leading to DGL having $304 million wiped off its market value over four trading days in the wake of Henry’s comments, with some fund managers blacklisting DGL, small shareholders selling – and a share price bounce-back of 5% following news Lim had been sent an apology

• In January 2021, a ‘short squeeze’ saw supporters of GameStop reverse GameStop’s plunging share value by colluding to assist ‘Meme stocks.’ The supporters collaborated on a subreddit called r/WallStreetBets, forced the value of GameStop stock to rise and cost investors who owned shorts on the stock billions of dollars – all thanks to Redditors colluding on an online discussion board.

How Online Obsessions Can Transform into Harassment

When it comes to personalized hatred of individual, identifiable human beings, the more public a person, the more likely they are to be a target, sadly.

Fixated individuals may post thousands of times a day for years on end, obsessing over a public figure. Even when blocked, they will simply create new accounts to continue the behavior – potentially causing significant negative impact on those they target.

Often there are elements of delusion wrapped up in the obsession, viewing a twisted view of reality. (ie. viewing things said by a news anchor as being targeted at them or people walking by as conspiratorial attempts by corporations to ‘gang stalk’ and silence them)

Obsession can quickly turn from romantic overtures through to ultimatums and physical threats. Spurned attention can lead to increased rhetoric.

How Signal Supports Companies to Combat Online Stalking and Harassment

Several media companies are Signal customers, and they deal with multiple instances of this sad reality. The victims are often female, sadly, and Forbes says harassment of women is 2.5 times more frequent in Western countries, and gaining at a rapid pace non-Western countries.

Signal is here to help, however. Cutting through the chatter, the open source security intelligence solution – which integrates with several related threat management systems – has taken care of the following:

• Signal has have helped find comments related to what people were wearing on a particular day,

• Signal can capture written records of stalkers admitting to watching targets undertaking family activities such as dropping kids off to school, marriage proposals, transfer of interest

• Signal can trace accounts between a multitude of platforms, establishing records of planning and organization before potential attacks.

• Signal has helped identify changes in behaviors that helped assist with identifying potential escalation of harassment

Safety of your employees is critical and a requirement as part of an organisation’s duty of care responsibilities. Get threat intelligence tool Signal today, save your employees and business from harm, and capture evidence for prosecution.

Contact Signal to learn more or schedule a demo.

Integrating with Other Apps to Stop Your Business Being Harmed

How Signal Manages Risks and Threats to Business

Recently Signal picked up activity on the web indicating a possible threat to the Chief Executive Officer of a military-related organisation.  

The stakes were pretty high - the CEO was receiving death threats, and conversations we intercepted between bad actors on the Deep Web indicated that the CEO’s home address might be revealed, seriously jeopardising his safety. 

The first step in combating the risk? Signal pushed the data it had detected into the corporate security operations platform of one of Signal’s integrated partners. Signal informed the at-risk organisation, handed over the relevant data - and the organisation was then able to instigate risk mitigation procedures. This offensive reaction was far more cost-effective than waiting to become defensive following an attack. 

The successful outcome wouldn’t have been possible before Signal became able to integrate with more and more platforms, enabling users to look at threats on what’s commonly known as ‘a single pane of glass.’ 

In plain English, this means centralised control on a unified dashboard. Signal helps by enabling information captured on the Dark Web and World Wide Web to be plugged into an increasing number of other platforms so the ‘bigger picture’ can be viewed all at once. 

Integrations with other Apps & Platforms to Prevent Harm

It’s about integration. Leading open source threat intelligence tool Signal works in the following ways: 

• Integrates with a number of other leading solutions in the safety and security market including Everbridge Critical Event Management, xMatters, Noggin and i2 Analyst’s Notebook

• Signal helps deliver a comprehensive view of developing incidents and events to assist with the protection of locations, assets, people or cyber environments

• Intelligence found by Signal can be shared with other integrated systems thanks to the setup of its API.

The Ways Signal Minimises Potential Harm to Business

Helping the CEO in the above story to avoid attack is one of dozens of use cases for which Signal is a powerful and effective tool. Businesses around the globe utilise Signal to minimise potential damage from:

• Data Breach detection - in which employees’ data, passwords, accounts and banking details are shared online and put up for auction

• Ransomware - in which an organisation or key suppliers are discussed on known ransomware forums as intended victims. 

• Employee inducement - this means employees targeted to provide confidential or secure information

• Doxing - personal details shared online, such as home addresses, family details, sensitive personal information

• Domain or IP mentions - shared online in hacking or cyber forums

• Saboteurs exploiting vulnerabilities with key applications. 

We can save your employees and business potential time, harm and money by keeping you aware of developing situations which might threaten your interests.

Contact Signal to learn more or schedule a demo.