Combined Threat and Cryptocurrency Intelligence Offerings Enable Customers to “Follow the Money” So They Can Better Identify Threat Actors and Groups, and Thwart Ransomware Attacks
GroupSense, a digital risk protection services company, and leading cryptocurrency intelligence company CipherTrace, today announced combining their threat intelligence offerings for enterprise clients who are victims of ransomware attacks.
The companies’ combined intelligence offerings – including GroupSense’s threat intelligence solutions and The CipherTrace™ blockchain analytics and transaction risk-scoring platform – will be used to share intelligence about digital risk and threat actor wallet information. This approach will give customers deeper visibility into how cryptocurrency changes hands, to better identify threat actors and groups, state-sponsored groups, and ransomware gangs conducting ransomware attacks. It will also help both companies adhere to compliance standards set by The Office of Foreign Assets Control – the financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the U.S. Treasury Department.
According to data from the FBI, ransomware attacks skyrocketed 400 percent year-over-year in 2020, with ransom payments moving from thousands to millions of dollars and disrupting critical infrastructure. The primary payment method of those transactions has been cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. And, as both threat actors and cryptocurrency technologies become more sophisticated, tracking and identifying cybercrimes using these currencies is becoming increasingly complex.
Founded in 2015 with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology (S&T) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), CipherTrace’s mission is to tackle this very challenge by protecting financial institutions from crypto-related threats. The company counts some of the largest banks, exchanges, and other financial institutions in the world as customers because of its best-in-class data attribution, analytics, proprietary clustering algorithms and coverage of more than 2,000 cryptocurrency entities. The platform delivers the world’s most comprehensive cryptocurrency intelligence by its ability to trace more than 800 virtual assets and provide visibility into 87 percent of global trading volume with hundreds of millions of attribution data points.
“The common connection between almost all threat actors is the use of cryptocurrencies, and our technology is able to comprehensively trace those transactions,” said Dave Jevans, CEO of CipherTrace. “Our partnership with GroupSense is bi-directional, as we’re able to offer our customers access to either our cryptocurrency-specific intelligence or GroupSense’s customized, operationally ready threat intelligence – both of which give customers deeper insight to detect and mitigate the cyberthreats that could most affect them.”
GroupSense provides risk intelligence – gathered from the deep and dark webs, social media, the cloud and more – that maps specifically to each customer’s digital business footprint and risk profile. The company does this by combining its TraceLight cyber reconnaissance technology and a world-class analyst team to deliver finished intelligence that is ready to use, requiring no additional processing and customization by client security teams. The CipherTrace™ platform was designed by world-class eCrime, payment and financial technology experts and its cryptocurrency intelligence embodies their deep experience and cybercrime threats models. The combination of these capabilities provides customers with the critical intelligence they need to better investigate and reveal potential cybercrimes associated with cryptocurrency transactions.
“Our partnership with CipherTrace will provide our analyst team with enriched intelligence about threat actors and groups, and particularly ransomware gangs, by allowing us to catalog and monitor the activity of sanctioned wallets, and draw connections between which wallets are associated with certain marketplaces,” said Kurtis Minder, CEO of GroupSense. “While our main focus is on gathering further intelligence through tracing cryptocurrency transactions specific to ransomware attacks, we also will be able to leverage the CipherTrace platform to help provide greater insight into a number of other cybercrimes, including insider trading.”
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