A next generation domain monitoring platform to protect remote workers from phishing attacks (SearchLight2.0).

Phishing attacks have always been a huge issue for organizations to defend against. The Verizon DBIR for 2020 shows that 22% of all data breaches in the last year involved phishing. In the UK, Government statistics show that 86% of businesses and 85% of charities that experienced a breach attributed it to phishing emails/websites. Phishing attacks result in annual revenue losses of £18bn to the UK alone, and they are extremely damaging to a company's brand reputation. They also pose a serious threat to wider society, as demonstrated by the Wannacry ransomware attack on the NHS in 2018\. Wannacry resulted in clean-up costs of £92m (paid for by the taxpayer) and 19,000 cancelled hospital appointments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated the problem further, as businesses have adapted to the crisis through remote working as offices have been inaccessible. This has accelerated digital transformation programmes, and even as the lockdown eases, industry experts are forecasting remote working is here to stay beyond the lifetime of the pandemic.

The current market-standard to identify and take down phishing websites is heavily resource intensive. Existing solutions, including DS's own market leading product (SearchLight) generate many false positives, all of which are analysed by humans for their validity. This makes it harder to scale in an organisation to be able to handle the number of domains being processed, causing a domino effect in a delay to notifying organisations of potential phishing websites, or in those organizations sifting through the false positives to find the actual phishing sites. According to ESG Research, "42% of cybersecurity professionals say their organization ignores a significant number of security alerts because they can't keep up with the volume".

SearchLight2.0 is a revolutionary next generation product, applying novel machine-learning and data science techniques to phishing website detection. It will identify, target, and eradicate phishing websites with scalable automation, reducing DS's current alert timeframe from 24-48 hours to less than 1 hour and with greater accuracy.