Company Overview:
This Bolster customer is a specialist private equity firm with over 170 portfolio companies, and offices around the globe. This mid-market firm takes a true partnership approach to help management teams build efficient and profitable businesses based on their unique needs. With a growing number of employees and customers working in a variety of industries, this firm has cast a wide net in terms of their audience base.
Similar to many businesses in the financial sphere, this Bolster customer has dealt with their fair share of cyber risk scams, with hackers doing everything they can to gain access to the firm’s financial data, assets, customer information, and more.
Challenges:
This private equity firm faces an array of brand impersonation and phishing scams that created a complicated environment for their security and risk team. Part of their business model includes company acquisitions to promote business growth, which in turn brings renewed attention to their brand.
Outside of acquisition-related phishing attacks, this private equity firm also struggled with domain management and deciding which lookalike-domains are worth proactively purchasing or putting resources towards taking down. With the growing amount of typosquat domains on the web targeting the firm’s true domains, it had become a full-time-job for members of the IT team to just protect their domains from spoofing.
“We’ve always been aware of all of the spoofed domains targeting us, but before Bolster we only had time to manage a handful of the most threatening domains,”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
This Bolster customer also experiences a variety of social media impersonations targeting their employees, customers, and overall brand across multiple social media platforms. This firm faced a particularly high number of executive impersonations through LinkedIn, which would jump after announcing new hires and acquisitions. When a new executive was announced, the firm’s employees would be targeted by fake versions of the new executive online, often asking for urgent help or sending a compromised link meant to dupe the employee. When a new fake account was brought to the team’s attention, it often meant a time-consuming, manual process of reporting an account and fighting for it to be taken down.
“We’d often wait around for a month or more to even hear back on our first message reporting an executive impersonation, and a lot of the time the responses would get us nowhere.”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
While this private equity firm does have a team of internal security professionals meant to identify and manage threats, they weren’t able to keep up with the surging level of threats that came from their growing popularity. That’s where Bolster came in.
Choosing Bolster:
This private equity firm chose Bolster as the AI security platform to help combat digital risks across the web and social media platforms. After going through the demo process and witnessing the Bolster security team and large language model (LLM) capabilities take down active threats, the security and IT team at this private equity firm trusted that Bolster was the right technology to protect their growing business.
“We were immediately impressed by the screenshots and visual data the Bolster technology was capturing surrounding the threats. It was a no-brainer decision.”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
Bolster’s LLM Copilot allowed for the quick detection of images that were tricking unsuspecting users into giving up their sensitive data, whether it was to a fake executive or a fake web portal. The speed and accuracy of the Bolster platform was far superior to the other vendors on the market.
Learn about vision language models (VLMs)
With Bolster on their side, the leading private equity firm was able to better identify and take down threats on social media and across the web. With access to Bolster’s best-in-class LLM platform, this customer was able to automate the threat protection process, giving their team back the hours of time they had been spending manually managing threats.
Key Benefits – Scaling to Combat Threats:
Members of this customer’s security and IT teams meet weekly to go over their cyber initiatives, and now Bolster is an active part of those calls, as well as their overall cyber defense strategy. This private equity firm is more aligned with their compliance requirements than ever before given the enhanced visibility, analytics, and reporting
This customer has also experienced new and evolving features of the Bolster platform, which they’ve been able to quickly make use of for their digital risk protection.
“We’ve witnessed firsthand the portal improvements with Bolster; our security and risk management has only improved because of it.”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
A Secure Presence on Social Media
Before implementing Bolster’s AI detection technology, the private equity firm would spend 3+ hours minimum trying to initiate a takedown of a social media threat. After working with Bolster, the team has been able to identify and takedown threats across social media platforms in minutes.
“The Bolster team took down fake profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn immediately after we integrated, which would have taken our team countless hours to figure out. It was a significant time-saver for us, and a very straightforward process.”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
This Bolster customer was able to upload their company assets, like logos and branded content, quickly and easily into the Bolster platform, and then leave the detection and takedowns in the hands of the Bolster team. Bolster only needed a few hours to train on the branded content and assets and leverage their LLM copilot to help detect infringements of threats online. When potential impersonation accounts or social media scams are discovered, the firm’s security team is easily able to track the status of the threat within the Bolster dashboard.
Domain Management that Puts the Firm First
Managing the plethora of typosquat possibilities was daunting, and it was critical that this private equity firm found an AI security technology that could quickly weed through the noise and takedown the malicious domains easily. With Bolster, this customer’s security team had a new partner that could guide them through the messy domain landscape, and successfully take down domain variants quicker than ever before.
The private equity firm doesn’t have a huge budget for purchasing like-domains as a preventative measure, which is why Bolster has become a pivotal part of the security program.
“We don’t have a super large budget for domain purchases, so monitoring for truly threatening domains is key for our team. Bolster has provided a huge sense of relief in this area.”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
Bolster offers a smart-recommender solution that analyzes the potential domains on the web and suggests which URL’s to proactively purchase based on your company’s unique budget and risk tolerance. Bolster also monitors domains throughout the entire lifecycle, so even after a site is taken down, we will actively monitor to make sure no further activity is detected.
“We are really seeing value from the domain monitoring capabilities and the dashboard.”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
A New Resource the Team Can Count On
Another aspect of the Bolster AI product that this private equity firm has found value in is access to the Bolster specialized team of experts. The Bolster team, comprised of both the SOC team and the customer’s personal support team member, are actively there to identify and support the customer through the identification and takedown process.
“Working with the team has been awesome. It’s great to have someone who’s able to jump in the portal for us, and on the phone with us when we need it.”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
From actively notifying the firm’s team if something requires their attention, to joining monthly calls with the team to go through program status, the Bolster team has become a valued asset for this private equity firm and has helped the firm grow without cyber threats getting in their way- being a strategic partner in their journey to strengthen their security posture.
Looking Ahead:
While this leading private equity firm is already tackling malicious domains and social media scams with Bolster’s suite of AI security tools, they are also interested in expanding into Dark Web Monitoring protection in the future. As a business that handles not only large amounts of money, but also has access to personal financial data, logins, and intellectual property, they remain a high-value target for dark web criminals. As a financial provider, this Bolster customer also faces pressure from regulatory groups to have proven protection methods against cyber threats on the dark web.
By integrating with Bolster’s AI-backed Dark Web Monitoring technology, this private equity firm could more efficiently detect and protect against dark web hackers.
“We don’t have a specific technology monitoring the Dark Web for the time being; Bolster would be a super helpful addition for us in this space because we already have them so tightly woven into our cyber risk program.”
Director of IT at Private Equity Firm
With continually evolving and refining LLM technology, and the productive feedback from customers like this private equity firm, Bolster users can trust that they have the best AI-powered solution to tackle the new and evolving cyber threats.
