Cybersecurity firm ZeroFox acquires dark web threat intelligence firm Vigilante

ZeroFox, a cybersecurity company that helps organizations detect risk on social media and digital channels, announced that it has acquired Vigilante, a dark web threat intelligence company.

Vigilante - not to be confused with the controversial crime reporting app - scours the dark web for intelligence to help protect businesses from cyberattacks. Terms of the deal, which was not announced, will see ZeroFox leverage Vigilante's global team of operators and analysts to create the "most powerful" dark web intelligence solution in the "industry.

Building on Vigilante's decades-old dark web monitoring tools, the joint solution will combine the two companies' data sets to provide risk intelligence on compromised credentials and botnets, cyber intelligence on infected and vulnerable hosts, and intelligence on threat actors and indicators of compromise (IOCs). The product will be embedded with ZeroFox's artificial intelligence processing capabilities and will also provide botnet exposure monitoring, threat monitoring, and incident response for customer-specific investigations and threat actor engagement and asset recovery.

Mike Kirschner, co-founder of Vigilante, said, "The combination of our otherwise unavailable data sets, our researchers and operations team, and ZeroFox's scale and artificial intelligence provides a compelling dark web intelligence service."

The acquisition comes amid a massive increase in criminal activity on the dark web, which the companies claim will help better protect global businesses on a larger scale, according to recent research. Due to cybercrime driven by the new crown epidemic, Risk Based Security said in its recent annual data breach report that the number of records included in 2020 exceeded 37 billion, a 141 percent increase over 2019, and a 100 percent increase in ransomware.

"The dark web and the criminal underground are key requirements for modern threat intelligence programs," said James C. Foster, CEO of ZeroFox." Our customers need a clear understanding of the underground economy, how bots might attack them, or whether their credentials, credit cards, personally identifiable information (PII) and other information can be traded there, as well as an understanding of emerging tactics, exploit tools and 0day vulnerabilities.

The acquisition of Vigilante adds "scale and comprehensiveness" to its dark web intelligence gathering capabilities, which helps protect customer information, Foster said.

Last February, ZeroFox announced it had raised $74 million in a Series D round led by Intel Capital, which it plans to use to accelerate its global expansion and product strategy. Prior to that, in 2017, the startup raised a $40 million Series C round led by Redline Capital Management and Silver Lake Waterman.