Strider Technologies has debuted its Strider Shield platform that helps businesses better understand potential threats to intellectual property — including nation-state directed IP theft and supply chain threats — by combining online tracking tools often used by advertising agencies with data ingestion tools, natural language processing and various algorithms. Strider co-founder and chief strategy officer Eric Levesque said that Strider Shield allows an enterprise to collect thousands of data points such as email addresses, domain names and keywords to correlate against systems where the IP resides, in order to surface potential risks.

VentureBeat reports that, “this approach makes it possible to surface high fidelity risk signals created by known actors as they, for example, visit websites or engage with people on social media sites, in addition to analyzing the tactics, techniques, and procedures often employed to steal IP.” Strider Shield can also “include economic statecraft analysis to track the source of those threats back to a nation-state that is most likely trying to benefit from the theft of IP”

Levesque added that because the techniques used to leverage data are “freely available online,” Strider Shield will not “compromise anyone’s privacy” but will still “help organizations identify threats that might be aimed at specific individuals with access to IP sought after by cybercriminals working on behalf of a nation-state.”

Levesque pointed out that, “rather than just attacking systems and applications, cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting weaknesses in processes,” which is leading organizations to “converge the management of cyber and physical security to better protect employees and safeguard their IP.”

Nation-states have also “expanded their cyberespionage activities to include IP that aids their economies,” resulting in “organizations of all sizes … increasing their efforts to protect IP and prevent a clone of a product or service they are about to launch suddenly becoming available in a country located halfway around the world.”

VB notes that, “there is no silver bullet when it comes to preventing the theft of IP … [but] if known actors are suddenly spending a lot of time researching a topic online, chances are good some sort of operation is being planned.”

In its press release, Strider co-founder and chief executive officer Greg Levesque said, “until now, security leaders have had to rely upon constant vigilance and one-off investigations to protect themselves.” In the face of “a growing number of nation-state actors” engaging in “widescale economic statecraft and intellectual property theft,” Strider Shield “illuminates potential compliance, intellectual property theft, and talent solicitation risks tied to nation-state actors.”

With the data surfaced by Strider Shield, “organizations have actionable and contextualized insights that decrease investigation times, expand visibility into emerging risk landscapes, and move security and legal teams to a proactive risk management posture.”

Strider, with operations in Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C., launched in May 2019 and, last year, secured a $10 million Series A investment.