PiiQ Media introduced PQ-PROTECT, a combined threat and vulnerability monitoring service for executives and other key employees. This offering provides important insight into the exposed information that can be used by attackers to compromise executives, as well as monitoring for current elevated threats across digital media – the social, deep, and dark webs.

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Today’s data breaches most often start with social engineering attacks, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report for 2021 found. These attacks are the first step in accessing privileged credentials, delivering ransomware or finding other vulnerabilities across a network. At the same time, executives and other key employees have become an increasing target for attack, making them a critical vulnerability for organizations. Improving their personal security, and thus the security of the companies they work for, is paramount.

Surveying for threats related to these executives provides real-time indicators of elevated risk. Monitoring and mitigating executive vulnerabilities based on their exposed personally identifiable information (PII) improves individual and corporate protection from social engineering threats.

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PQ-PROTECT safeguards organizations and their employees in these ways:

• Individual executives and high-profile individuals can identify the information that could be used against them in social engineering-based attacks. PQ-PROTECT also helps protect these individuals from increased physical risk by identifying exposed PII that divulges sensitive information.
• Corporate security officers and information security officers who are responsible for protecting corporate information systems are empowered to reduce the exposed PII of employees, which improves corporate security and protection.
• Companies achieve improved oversight of their overall risk exposure by monitoring indicators of compromise (IoCs) to company or executive reputational management.

Aaron Barr, chief technology officer, PiiQ Media, said: “The human layer of corporate information hasn’t been given enough attention, yet it’s the primary means of corporate compromise. Monitoring for increased risk based on digital conversations, combined with identifying and mitigating unnecessary PII exposures, are the best way to reduce corporate risk. PQ-PROTECT, along with a more modern and robust security awareness training program, provides the best protection against advanced social engineering attacks.”