Finance and Business Sites
Finance and Business sites are online platforms dedicated to professional networking, investment, financial news, startup funding, and business intelligence. In the context of cybersecurity, they are extremely high-risk targets because they directly handle financial assets, sensitive business data (M&A, strategy), and high-value PII of executives and investors. The primary cybersecurity risks are financial fraud, insider trading/espionage, and targeted social engineering against financially motivated users.
Professional/Finance Sites
These sites facilitate financial transactions, connect professionals, or provide market analysis and investment tools.
Cybersecurity Context:
Insider Trading and Espionage: Platforms focused on finance (Tinkoff Invest, TradingView, smart-lab.ru) and startups (angel.co, F6S) contain sensitive, market-moving information. Compromise of these platforms or user accounts can lead to corporate espionage or illegal insider trading.
Targeted Social Engineering (Whaling): Sites like Xing and angel.co are rich sources of information on executives and high-net-worth individuals. Attackers use this data to craft highly personalized spear-phishing and "whaling" attacks designed to bypass security controls and initiate fraudulent wire transfers.
Financial Fraud and Scams: Investment forums and economic platforms are frequently used to promote fraudulent investment schemes, pump-and-dump scams, or phishing sites that steal banking or brokerage credentials.
Credential Theft: The high value of these accounts (linked to money or professional identity) makes them prime targets for credential theft. Leaks from these services are immediately used in credential-stuffing attacks against other financial institutions.
Examples: An attacker targets an executive using the profile information from Xing to send a fraudulent email regarding a "funding round update" that leads to a malicious document download. A fake investment analyst creates a convincing profile on TradingView or profi.ru, gaining users' trust before directing them to a clone site of their bank or brokerage to "verify" an investment.
PII and Patron Data Risk: While primarily a creator funding site, Patreon handles direct financial transactions and detailed patron/creator data, making it a target for data theft
ThreatNG is a powerful solution for addressing the high-stakes cybersecurity risks associated with Finance and Business sites by providing an unauthenticated, external view of compromised executive data, financial leaks, and brand impersonation campaigns.
External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG's External Discovery process operates like an attacker conducting initial reconnaissance, continuously mapping the organization's exposed footprint across professional and financial platforms. Continuous Monitoring ensures immediate detection of new leaks or fraudulent activity.
Dark Web Presence: This is vital for finance-related risks. ThreatNG continuously monitors the Dark Web and high-risk forums for mentions of organizations and associated Compromised Credentials. If a threat actor is discussing or selling access to an employee's Tinkoff Invest or Xing account, or if credentials from a breach of a site like Patreon or angel.co are dumped, ThreatNG detects the compromised credentials using the corporate email address.
Sentiment and Financials: This unique component directly addresses the high-value information risks associated with these sites. ThreatNG tracks public data, including SEC Filings, Risk and Oversight Disclosures, and Layoff Chatter. This intelligence helps security teams prioritize defense where business strategy is exposed. For example, a sudden surge in discussion or "chatter" on a financial forum like smart-lab.ru or TradingView about a possible merger or acquisition involving the organization, combined with the discovery of relevant internal documents in an Archived Web Page (see below), raises an immediate red flag for corporate espionage risk.
Archived Web Pages: ThreatNG searches archived content across the web for exposed documents and PII. Suppose an executive or employee accidentally uploaded a sensitive document containing M&A details or financial forecasts to a professional profile on F6S or profi.ru before deleting it. In that case, ThreatNG's index can still discover and flag the leaked Document File or Txt File, transforming this into a critical data leak alert.
External Assessment for Financial and Business Risks
ThreatNG's External Assessment scores translate professional and financial risks into measurable, prioritized security issues.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This score is heightened by the constant threat of whaling and targeted social engineering originating from these sites.
Example (Impersonation): ThreatNG detects the creation of a fraudulent domain that impersonates a funding platform such as angel.co or a social site such as Xing. The external assessment identifies this domain as a high-risk lookalike. This allows the security team to preemptively block or alert users about phishing attempts targeting this fraudulent domain, which might otherwise be used to steal credentials from high-value employees.
Example (Executive Exposure): The assessment monitors the digital footprint of key executives. If an executive's profile on Xing or F6S is heavily scraped and used by a known threat group to launch a whaling attack, the organization’s BEC susceptibility score increases, prompting greater scrutiny of communications targeting that executive.
Data Leak Susceptibility: The discovery of any Associated Compromised Credentials from the financial sites themselves (e.g., login details for Tinkoff Invest or a banking app linked to an employee's work email) immediately increases this score, signaling a direct path to financial or system compromise.
Investigation Modules and Username Exposure
ThreatNG’s Investigation Modules enable security teams to connect exposed professional profiles and usernames to confirmed threats quickly.
Social Media Investigation Module - Username Exposure
This module is paramount for combating targeted social engineering against professionals, where username reuse is common.
Passive Reconnaissance: The module performs broad checks for usernames and handles of key personnel across thousands of sites, including professional platforms. It actively identifies the presence of employees' usernames on sites such as Xing, Angel.co, and financial forums.
Example: ThreatNG discovers that an organization’s VP of Sales is using their professional-sounding username on Xing and that this same username was included in a significant data breach from a forum discussing profi.ru. The Username Exposure module confirms this credential re-use risk, enabling the security team to enforce a unique password policy and MFA for the VP, preventing an attacker from using the leaked credential to pivot to corporate accounts.
Intelligence Repositories and Reporting
ThreatNG's Intelligence Repositories ensure that the external findings from Finance and Business sites are immediately categorized as high-priority threats.
DarCache Dark Web and DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials): When a financial site or a related platform is breached, the resulting dump is ingested. DarCache Rupture immediately filters this to flag all employee credentials (e.g., those using a corporate email to log into Patreon or TradingView) as Associated Compromised Credentials, triggering a critical alert.
DarCache Vulnerability (KEV, EPSS, PoC Exploits): This tracks vulnerabilities relevant to the technologies used by financial platforms. Suppose a new zero-day vulnerability is discovered in the content management system used by a significant financial news site, and this is being exploited to inject malware. In that case, ThreatNG flags the vulnerability as a Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV), allowing the organization to prepare defenses against the threat.
Reporting compiles all these findings—from an executive's compromised password on the Dark Web to a financial forecast document found on a third-party startup site—into a clear, Prioritized format. The MITRE ATT&CK Mapping correlates the finding (e.g., leaked M&A document) to the "Collection" or "Exfiltration" tactics of an advanced persistent threat.
ThreatNG with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG’s external visibility is critical for informing and enhancing the capabilities of complementary security tools, creating a stronger defense against financial and espionage threats.
Integration with an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Complementary Solution: ThreatNG's BEC & Phishing Susceptibility module identifies a new phishing campaign targeting the organization’s executives, using compelling impersonation emails crafted from their Angel.co and Xing profiles. The campaign delivers a highly obfuscated document that installs a backdoor. ThreatNG shares the hash and signature of the malicious document with an EDR complementary solution. The EDR solution can then immediately scan all corporate endpoints, quarantine the malicious document upon detection, and block its execution, neutralizing the targeted attack.
Integration with a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Complementary Solution: ThreatNG's Archived Web Pages module discovers that an internal document detailing investment strategy was accidentally posted on a public profi.ru forum. ThreatNG extracts key phrases and the document's structure, then shares this information with a complementary DLP solution. The DLP solution can then use these unique identifiers to monitor all internal channels (email, cloud drives) for any other instances of the same highly sensitive document, helping to identify the internal source of the original leak and prevent further accidental exfiltration.
