Although employers who require their employees to complete the annual cyberspace lessons in cyberspace, cyber violations are still taking place. The problem could even deteriorate, as genetic AI increases the scale and personalization of social engineering campaigns.
AnagramFormerly known as Cipher, he is adopting a new approach to training the employee in cyberspace that the company hopes can keep up with the changing nature of these campaigns.
The New York -based company created a platform that contains practical security training for businesses. The training includes bite -sized videos and personalized interactive puzzles to teach employees how to detect suspicious emails and communication messages. These trainings are designed to be more frequent and more attractive than the current model of an annual, long training session.
Harley Sugarman, founder and CEO of Anagram, told Techcrunch that these activities include tasks such as employees creating their own personalized e -mail messages to teach them how to identify sophisticated campaigns.
“We got very little, in fact, basically no inspiration from the existing things out there,” Sugarman said of existing cyberspace. “What we really took were lessons from Tiktok, and lessons from Duolingo and Khan Academy. We examined these platforms that have really done, really well -involved and changing users outside the security area and said, okay, how can we apply these classes?”
Building Gamified Cybersecurity’s training was not what Sugarman, a former VC at Bloomberg Beta, started doing when he started the company first.
Sugarman’s first idea was a way to get the CYBERSECURITY “CAPTURE THE FLAG” training approach to upgrade Enterprise Cybersecurity. This training approach involves building software with vulnerabilities and having security researchers entering the software to find errors and understand how to write code without falling into the same traps.
This company started as encrypted in 2022 and gained some attraction. However, heads of information security officials (CISOS) began telling Sugarman that their businesses had really had a bigger issue of security they were trying to deal with: their employees without security. Sugarman said Ciso describes their employees as a weakest link to cyberspace.
“What kind of surprised me was only the amount of despair I heard in their voices,” Sugarman said. “This was an unexpected problem for them.”
The encrypted encrypted in January 2024 to focus on solving this problem. Now the start changes its name to Anagram to reflect its new focus and is in the process of clearing its original product. Anagram has seen strong growth from the axis and landed by its customers, such as Thomson Reuters, Massmutual and Disney, among others.
Anagram recently increased a $ 10 million A -series round, led by Madrona with the participation of General Catalyst, Bloomberg Beta and operators’ associates, among others. The company plans to use the funds to create the sales team and continue to improve the product. Sugarman said so far he has managed to bring the company’s electronic fishery rates from 20% to 6%, but believes they could continue to approach zero.
Sugarman said Anagram started its product at a truly interesting turning point for cyberspace. With the progresses of genetics AI, social engineering campaigns can be more personalized than ever, which will make people more difficult for people to say what is real and what they are not.
“I think the kind of side effect is that traditional email security platforms will have a much harder time to detect these phishes created by AI,” Sugarman said. “This ability to create and randomize is so strong. And it is really, really difficult, from a mechanical perspective, to defend against it.”
Anagram is also working to develop an AI agent who will sit on business workers’ emails and train to highlight possible cyberspace slides before they happen. Sugarman said the agent will do things like pop up to ask someone if they really want to send their credit card details by email and other similar guarantees.
In the meantime, Anagram hopes that puzzles and tiktok -like videos and educational videos will continue to move the needle.
“People are not dumb, we built skyscrapers that we can make space trips,” Sugarman said. “We can understand how not to click on a suspicious link to an email.”
