Most organizations are familiar with Mark Monitor, A Thomson Reuters service that continuously scans the Internet for abuses of brands and intellectual property. If a counterfeit website or even a domain is registered Mark Monitor will alert their client’s legal team. Now there is a similar service for your personal brand.
Survela is easy to sign up for, just provide your name and email and its search engine digs into its store of information to reveal every mention of you and grades them on several criteria: legal, confidential, sex related, etc. When I signed up for the free beta, Survela quickly found 250,000 mentions of me on the Internet and identified 70 of them as possible problems. Thankfully, none were an issue.
If you are like most people you probably have a Google alert set on your name. Google will let you know when your name is posted in a blog or news article. Or you may have singed up for Newsle, one of my favorite alerting services. But Survela goes deeper.
securitycurrent reached out to Survela to learn more and received the following from Survela’s founder, Julio Casal:
securitycurrent: When was Survela founded?
Casal: “In 2007 I founded, with different co-founders, 2 companies: AlienVault and Buzztrend, AlienVault responded to the need to obtain visibility into the large amounts of disperse data inside companies. Buzztrend envisioned the need for monitoring and protecting brands from the outside world: the vast information published on the Internet; a space I would call Digital Surveillance at the enterprise level or cyber safety at the lower market level.
“My guess is that companies first had to clean their houses and AlienVault exploded doing just that. That’s where we focused all these years, it took all of our energies, specially the first years.
“We believe it is time for people and organizations to worry about their exposure outside their networks. There are so many facts that clearly point to this (Snowden, growth of the deep web, leakage explosion, etc.). As opposed to AlienVault were we started in the enterprise segment and came down to the mid market, we want to start this time from the bottom, the people, and move up to organizations and brands in the mid market.
“We are changing the name for this new phase from Buzztrend to Survela, which will be officially launched 1st of February as a Silicon Valley company with Venture Capital funds.”
securitycurrent: Who are the founders?
Casal: “I founded it with a number of angels.”
securitycurrent: Does Survela search breach databases, such as the recent Target breach info that is available? Or the Strafor data?
“Yes, we do, we aggregate all the public information from the Internet and the Deep Web about breaches, defacements and leakages. We are partnering with counter-attack specialized companies that gather this information from bot networks, information which is not public, we want to include a number of them so our customers have the biggest chance of knowing if their credit card or banking credentials have been stolen.”
securitycurrent: Does Survela monitor things like pastebin?
“Yes, but you have to activate it from the configuration panel. The difficulty here is to make this convergence of privacy, reputation, and security easy and for the user, specially the non experts.
“BTW: available right now in the actual beta version is credit card checking, credential and dox will be available in the next weeks.”
——————————-
Survela is a timely idea. After every major breach of information from Gawker, to Strafor, to Target, there have been tools set up to check whether your information is in the leaked data. But most security conscious people are reluctant to volunteer their name and email address to an untrustworthy site to perform that check. Downloading the entire list of breached data, as many do, to check to see if your own identity has been compromised, may even be illegal.
Survela is a known source with a founder who understands security. Keep an eye on this company.