For years, some of the most dangerous hacking threats have come from adversarial nation-state hackers conducting espionage, Russian ransomware gangs targeting critical infrastructure, and governments targeting journalists with spyware that can punch through the security of almost any phone.
But a new phenomenon of mostly English-speaking young adults and teenage hackers has risen to become a top pressing global threat of today, spanning cybercrime, child abuse, and extremism.
By tearing through some of the biggest companies, tech giants, and governments, these young and highly financially motivated hackers have destroyed networks and extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy corporate victims.
One of the few companies with eyes on this subculture is Unit 221B, a New Jersey-based security company that has made a name for itself by tracking these hackers and disrupting their operations where others have struggled or outright failed.
Investors have taken notice of the security company. Unit 221B said it raised the $5 million seed round from J2 Ventures, whose general partner Christine Keung said in prepared remarks that the company is “the missing puzzle piece in threat disruption and attribution.”
Law enforcement has been slow to combat the threat from these sometimes-called “advanced persistent teenagers,” who paved the way for some of the world’s biggest hacks to date, including dozens of corporate giants whose Snowflake cloud accounts were hacked, and the ransomware attack on the MGM Resorts.
In some cases, the hackers stole monumental amounts of people’s personal data and disrupted companies for lengthy spells that prompted economic warnings for entire nations.
Unit 221B has helped break the law enforcement deadlock in multiple investigations, the company’s top brass tells TechCrunch, by securing key arrests of high-profile hackers associated with groups like Scattered Spider and the nebulous wider cybercrime community known as The Com. This is in large part thanks to its flagship threat intelligence platform eWitness and its diverse team of hackers, engineers, and forensic specialists.
The company has also helped to recover legal wins and financial losses based on the findings of their investigations.
The $5 million in seed funding will be used to expand and improve its eWitness threat intelligence platform, with the aim of helping law enforcement and government investigators track and arrest malicious hackers faster.
“The problems we’re solving are most acutely how the online threat landscape has evolved — youth that are able to go online and cause very high harm, both in the real world and online world, at much speed and scale, that just didn’t exist a few years ago,” Unit 221B’s chief executive May Chen-Contino tells TechCrunch.
“We’re hyper focused on that current problem,” said Chen-Contino.
eWitness is an invite-only software platform that collects large amounts of threat intelligence — information that can be used for tracking malicious threat actors across the web — from trusted sources, including police, journalists, and security researchers. The platform aims to make it easier for investigators to identify and track these threats, collect and preserve information for building cases, and to hand off intelligence to others for additional work.
The platform is also used by private companies, including the Fortune 500, who use the collected intelligence to track the threat from these groups, such as how often their brand or their industry vertical are targeted or compromised.
Allison Nixon, Unit 221B’s chief research officer and a leading expert on English-speaking hacking threats, told TechCrunch that The Com is likely “going to continue to grow in the same trajectory that has been,” and that the funding will help the company further its ability to track and help investigators arrest English-speaking threats.