Hoxhunt

CREATING HUMAN FIREWALLS

Throughout our digital revolution, information systems have continuously evolved into strong and increasingly impermeable structures, to the point where obvious technical vulnerabilities are no longer rampant problems. For modern cybercriminals, this means looking beyond the code to a much greater vulnerability: the human actor.

For countless organizations, employees have become the target for cybersecurity attacks, and every day an increasing number of companies are attacked with something as simple as a malicious email. The bigger a company gets, the more points of failure start to emerge.

HoxHunt CEO and co-founder, Mika Aalto, recognized this trend while working for a tech company, where security issues triggered by a human error caused him daily frustration, eventually sparking his interest in cybersecurity.

Aalto, along with co-founders Pyry Åvist, Pasi Salo and Karri Kurunmäki started HoxHunt with the goal of taking employees - the weakest link in the face of a cyber threat - and turning them into the greatest asset for a company’s online security.

They call this creating human firewalls.

HoxHunt works on training their users to recognize and block attacks like information leaks and ransomware. The training is innovative and interactive, as users are engaged through the simulation and gamification of different kinds of virtual attacks. The user then has to recognize and report the attacks, and are eventually awarded for their recognition.

Before HoxHunt, organizations average risk to phishing attacks was at a whopping 40 percent, with only a five percent reporting rate on real attacks. After an organization uses HoxHunt, the average risk dropped drastically to only two percent, and reporting rates have climbed to 70 percent.

Hoxhunt recently raised €2.5 million in a funding round led by Dawn Capital. Icebreaker is proud of its participation in transforming cybersecurity, along with Risto Siilasmaa chairman of Nokia, and founder of F-Secure.

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