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Flashpoint in 2023: A Note From Our CEO

How Flashpoint will improve, innovate, and inspire in 2023

Harnessing the OSINT revolution

To me, 2022 was the year of OSINT, a time when open-source intelligence (finally) got its time in the sun. This is due in large part to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a hybrid war nearing the one-year mark that’s being waged across cyber and physical battlefields. In fact, the war between Russia and Ukraine has become the poster child for how truly essential and impactful OSINT can be, especially during a modern military engagement.

To be clear, Ukrainians and organizations active in Ukraine face the most acute risks. But this war is also actively impacting even those who are not physically present in Ukraine, including commercial entities and world governments. For these organizations, gaining reliable, timely, and actionable intelligence is a constant test—one that Flashpoint is helping hundreds of clients tackle daily. 

OSINT has long been a mission-critical investigatory tool in the security and intelligence community, especially in the public sector, and 2022 proved that out. Malware, insider threats, data breaches, financial and cryptocurrency fraud, violent extremism, social engineering schemes, and ransomware continued to plague organizations of all sizes across the public and private sectors. 

Strengthened by our 2022 acquisitions of Risk Based Security and Echosec Systems, Flashpoint is now the commercial leader in open-source intelligence, which CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank calls “one of our richest sources of insight and our INT of first resort.” 

Today, more than 730 customers globally rely on our intelligence, expertise, and technology—leaning on Flashpoint to form a bulwark between their assets and risk. In 2023, Flashpoint will continue to invest in OSINT’s revolutionary effect in order to continue to deliver on our mission. Here’s how.

Roadmap 2023

In the last 12 months we’ve delivered new products, features, and functionalities to our clients that make our data and intelligence even more actionable. This includes: 

• Flashpoint Automate to help create automatic workflows 
• A first-of-its-kind ransomware prediction model for vulnerabilities 
• Flashpoint Monitor, a new alerting and analysis capability that helps intel analysts quickly and easily transform open-source data into actionable intelligence 
• Managed Attribution, our virtual machine solution to empower our users to access OSINT securely and anonymously.

In 2023, Flashpoint will deliver products that make it even easier for security teams of all sizes and sophistication levels to leverage OSINT, as well as our complete suite of risk intelligence tools, to find and stop threats quickly. To accomplish this, our roadmap is focused, in part, on putting all the right OSINT into a single platform that empowers different security teams to take the right actions tailored to their mission to reduce risk. 

More than simply supporting a single team, Flashpoint is able to empower teams across organizations to reduce their overall holistic risk across both the cyber and physical domains. Security programs that take holistic perspectives of addressing risk will be best prepared to prevent and mitigate an expanding threat landscape. 

UX improvements

In the year ahead, we’ll be releasing a redesign of our entire user experience with more intuitive navigation, situational awareness to guide teams to the most important intelligence to discover threats quickly, and blazing fast search rebuilt from the ground up with proprietary data science models to deliver the most relevant results up front. 

Whether in the commercial sector on a Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), Vulnerability Management, or Physical Security team or in the public sector in Defense, Law Enforcement, or National Security, our upcoming experience is going to save teams and organizations time and cost in detecting and mitigating threats. 

Intelligence classes

Furthermore, in order to make our intelligence more accessible and easily discoverable by teams, Flashpoint will be releasing mission-based intelligence classes. The dizzying array of intelligence and data sources can make it difficult to find the most relevant intelligence. 

Today, teams need to know which data sources to search in combination with what is relevant for their specific security mission, ranging from vulnerabilities, financial fraud, threat actors, and many more. Flashpoint is changing that with clearly defined intelligence classes that are tied directly to mission to help find the relevant intelligence quickly and easily.

OSINT’s continued impact

In addition to our products and solutions supporting the private sector, we’re also very proud that our OSINT is supporting public sector missions as well. Whether Defense, Law Enforcement, or National Security, Flashpoint’s data and intelligence have been applied to save lives and reduce risk, reflecting the profoundly positive impact OSINT can make in our world. 

In addition, different security teams leverage the same OSINT data in different ways, based on their missions, and Flashpoint will help connect the dots for teams to collaborate in reducing risk benefiting the entire organization. OSINT’s impact crosses teams, industries, and the private and public sectors. As threat intelligence continues to evolve, OSINT has become a must-have in informing and assessing risk. 

Noted Ewbank, “When you think about the future of the intelligence business…you should first think about open source.” 

To a safe and successful year ahead

All of these upcoming improvements highlight that in 2023, Flashpoint’s risk intelligence platform will be the essential tool for security teams of all sizes and maturities who recognize that intelligence works best in a multi-team approach to reduce risk holistically. 

We are excited to roll out these improvements throughout the year to help our customers protect their employees, customers, assets, and stakeholders in the face of the threats we will undoubtedly face in 2023. While certainly there will be threats to face in the new year, I’m optimistic that as a security community, we will again rise to the challenge, and that 2023 will be a successful year for the good guys. 

In the end, this is the name of the game: leveraging intelligence to close gaps in an organization’s risk profile. This was, as ever, Flashpoint’s focus in 2022. And it will continue to be our focus in 2023. 

Thank you to our Flashpoint customers, partners, and team for a successful 2022—we are proud to partner with our customers to help them and the broader community reduce their risk. And, of course, I’d like to wish the entire community a very happy, healthy, and safe new year!

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Why We Acquired Echosec Systems: The OSINT Revolution

Flashpoint CEO Josh Lefkowitz on the Echosec acquisition and the proven, foundational importance of open source intelligence

It’s our mission as intelligence providers to some of the world’s most discerning clients to help them stay ahead of the threats that could impede their focus on protecting their people, places, and assets everywhere. 

Today thus marks a key moment in our evolution as a company. I’m delighted about our acquisition of Echosec Systems, whose team and technology are world class and whose intelligence will help us continue to help companies reduce risk holistically across teams. 

Here’s why I’m so excited to be able to bring Echosec’s open-source, social media, and geospatial intelligence to a wider audience, and where we go from here.

The Importance of OSINT

I began my career in the wake of 9/11 analyzing the activities of terrorist groups to support numerous national security investigations and prosecutions. My experiences in this domain spurred the recognition that open source intelligence (OSINT) could be an invaluable counterterrorism tool. When we realized that OSINT in the modern era couldn’t be done without automating data collection and analytics at scale, Flashpoint was born.

The online spaces where threat actors congregate and operate have evolved dramatically since the early 2000s and now include illicit communities, criminal marketplaces, paste sites, and foreign-language forums across the deep and dark web. Furthermore, there’s much intelligence to be gleaned from publicly available information (PAI) and OSINT derived from social media, including geospatial data, social sentiment, and other real-time information that can support mission requirements for national security, public safety, and commercial security teams.

Today, OSINT is a proven and foundational element to the intelligence community. 

As Jennifer Ewbank, Deputy Director for Digital Innovation at the CIA, said recently: “Many questions that once had to be answered by more secretive intelligence collection are now answered with a few clicks on a mobile device.” 

She added, “OSINT is the INT of first resort, informing every aspect of the intelligence community’s mission. When you think about the future of the intelligence business…you should first think about open source.”

And the most dynamic and impactful intelligence partners, like Flashpoint, are helping organizations leverage technology to harness OSINT at scale, organize it, classify it, make sense of it, and understand when action is warranted.

Why Echosec

This is where Echosec is a leader in giving users the ability to leverage real-time OSINT to drive on-the-ground insights and action. Complemented by Flashpoint’s own OSINT and unique collections, this key acquisition continues our evolution as the leading provider of actionable intelligence, supporting cyber and physical security missions around the world.

Data, Platform, and Compliance

Echosec has built an extraordinarily intuitive and highly user-friendly platform that is helping some of the most demanding and discerning customers address a broad array of threats globally. 

Echosec maintains broad coverage across critical social media platforms worldwide. Their OSINT provides security teams across the public and private sector localized situational awareness in faraway places, helping them better assess geopolitical risk, keep executives from harm, protect populations and places, and respond to crises in an informed and efficient manner.

In addition to best-in-class social media collections, Echosec has maintained a focus on ensuring compliance with all social media platforms. The company’s respect for privacy and security of data subjects was a key factor in our decision to acquire them and falls in line with our own policies. Both Flashpoint and Echosec share an ethos around the importance of ethical and compliant data access to be a trusted intelligence partner. 

Mission and Team

Additionally, the Echosec and Flashpoint missions are very well aligned—notably overlapping around the theme of protection. Our mission alignment is incredibly important as we move forward with the merged companies, as it will ensure continuity and clarity to both organizations’ current and future clients.

Our mission will continue to drive the choices we make as a company so that we can continue to help organizations protect what they value and cherish most, and to do our part to make the world a safer place.

Echosec’s team is a mighty one, and what they’ve built is incredible. I am so excited to bring on a team as talented as they are and whose culture- and mission-driven  values align so well with ours. 

The Future is Now

Buoyed by Echosec’s data, platform, and approach to compliance, coupled with our mutual and value/team alignment, Flashpoint is geared up for huge successes in the coming months and years.

Following on the heels of our Risk Based Security acquisition in January, the integration of Echosec further enables Flashpoint to empower CTI, vulnerability management, and corporate security teams to work together to detect, prioritize, and mitigate the threats across their organization to reduce overall risk more comprehensively. 

In the weeks to come, as we integrate Echosec’s data and technology into the Flashpoint Suite, we can’t wait to share with our customer and peers our extended capabilities, delivering the world’s most robust combination of data, analytics, and automation across a wide range of security use cases.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why did Flashpoint acquire Echosec and how does it improve the platform?

Flashpoint acquired Echosec to integrate world-class OSINT and social media intelligence into its existing threat data ecosystem. This improves the platform by providing a unified view of both cyber and physical risks. Flashpoint users can now monitor dark web forums and real-time social media activity in a single workspace, allowing them to detect threats against their personnel and facilities that traditional cyber intelligence might miss.

Flashpoint Feature	Acquisition Benefit
Location-Based Search	Allows users to monitor security events at specific GPS coordinates.
Broad OSINT Access	Connects dark web chatter with surface web social media trends.
Unified Dashboard	Streamlines investigations by housing CTI and PSI in one interface.

How does the addition of Echosec technology enhance executive protection?

The addition of Echosec technology enhances executive protection by allowing security teams to monitor for doxing, threats, and travel risks on social media. Flashpoint can now identify when a leader’s travel plans are being discussed in illicit forums and then use Echosec’s geofencing to monitor the safety of the specific hotel or event venue they are visiting. This provides a digital-to-physical protective shield for high-profile personnel.

• Real-Time Monitoring: Alerts teams to social media posts targeting specific executives.
• Geofencing: Tracks activity around an executive’s current location or destination.
• Sentiment Analysis: Identifies rising hostility or planned protests before they reach a leader’s location.

Why is Flashpoint’s “360-degree view of risk” vital for modern enterprises?

Flashpoint’s 360-degree view of risk is vital because modern threats are no longer strictly digital or physical. A threat actor might use social media to coordinate a physical breach of a data center or recruit an insider for a cyberattack. By combining Echosec’s social data with Flashpoint’s deep web collections, enterprises can identify these cross-functional threats in their early stages and mitigate them before they impact the business.

Threat Type	Flashpoint Integrated Response
Physical Security	Uses geofencing to detect on-the-ground threats to corporate offices.
Brand Protection	Tracks both dark web counterfeit sales and social media brand abuse.
Supply Chain	Monitors logistics hubs for both cyber vulnerabilities and physical disruptions.

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