2023 Innovation Rewind: Top 10 Flashpoint Products, Features, and Developments

“To еxcеl as a product leader, a company must have a deep understanding of changing market requirements and provide a solution of truly exceptional quality and reliability. Frost & Sullivan recognizes Flashpoint as the best-in-class company that embodies this principle and executes it.”

Frost and Sullivan

Protecting our customers from an ever-evolving threat landscape has been Flashpoint’s mission ever since 2010. Over a decade later, our commitment to our clients, from commercial enterprises to public sector organizations, remains the same, as we help them safeguard critical assets, avoid financial loss, and protect lives and resources.

In 2023, we continued to unveil groundbreaking innovations via our products and solutions—spanning cyber threat intelligence, vulnerability intelligence, geopolitical risk, physical security, fraud and brand protection.

Here are the top 10 products and features from the last year that empower our customers to keep themselves, and the world around them, safe from diverse cyber and physical threats.

Related reading: How Flashpoint Shaped the News in 2023: Data, Intelligence, and Domain Expertise

1. Flashpoint Ignite launches

The Flashpoint Ignite platform has been providing incredible value for our customers, delivering tailored intelligence across multiple security functions in a combined workspace. Serving as a one stop shop for our best-in-class threat, vulnerability, and physical intelligence, it is enabling various security teams to collaborate and remediate risk faster.

“Intelligence that’s easy to find. Mission-critical. Actionable. And fast. That’s the Ignite experience.”

Patrick Gardner, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Flashpoint

We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. Looking into 2024, Flashpoint customers can expect more enrichments, integrations, and visualizations. However, our commitment to innovation doesn’t end with Ignite. At Flashpoint, we’ve also been introducing new additions and improvements to other products, all to help organizations achieve better outcomes.

2. Ignite AI

Ignite AI, Flashpoint’s artificial intelligence chatbot, enables our customers to engage in natural language conversations for rapid-response questions-and-answers sourced from our finished intelligence.

Using Ignite AI, users can make well-informed decisions in a fraction of the time research traditionally takes. This helps Flashpoint customers make rapid decisions and enhance strategic planning, risk assessments, and executive briefings.

3. VulnDB surpasses 100K non-CVEs

Flashpoint’s VulnDB is the most comprehensive, actionable, and timely source of vulnerability intelligence on the market. It allows organizations to search for and be alerted on the latest vulnerabilities, and that includes the over 100,000 vulnerabilities missing from the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. VulnDB fully maps to CVE and NVD and each entry is standardized, containing up to 60 distinct classifications and detailed metadata, enabling vulnerability management teams to spend more time remediating issues than triaging.

The number of vulnerabilities being publicly disclosed every year continues to grow, while organizations struggle to monitor them at the same rate. This causes vulnerability management teams to be put under pressure, often to the point that they must decide which issues to deprioritize. As such, Flashpoint’s VulnDB helps security teams become aware of newly disclosed vulnerabilities two weeks faster than NVD on average—while also providing them visibility into zero-days and other high-profile emerging vulnerabilities. VulnDB also has integrations with ServiceNow and Splunk and can be integrated into your current tools or workflow.

While VulnDB is a standalone product built for vulnerability management teams, Ignite customers should be excited for 2024. Our engineering teams are hard at work further interweaving VulnDB’s rich data into the Flashpoint Ignite platform, which will provide users with threat-based risk scores as well as all of VulnDB’s classifications for vulnerabilities with and without CVE IDs.

4. Managed Attribution

Security teams handle malware and other malicious online threats on a daily basis. However, handling malicious files or online investigations can be incredibly difficult—a mistake could compromise an organization’s infrastructure, or reveal the location of critical systems to threat actors.

We released Managed Attribution earlier this year to provide a means for security teams to research threats instead of having to build the technology to do so. It is a flexible, fully managed virtual environment that is completely isolated from an organization’s web browsers, computers, and network infrastructure. This enables security teams to safely interact with potentially malicious files and browse the deep and dark web safely, while also giving organizations the capability to manipulate their own digital fingerprint. Using Managed Attribution, Flashpoint customers are making their intelligence even more actionable, and are deepening their research capabilities.

5. Threat Actor Profiles

Threat actors quickly change their behaviors to avoid detection or attribution. This makes it difficult for practitioners, as they must manually track these changes—mapping specific indicators and spotting behavioral patterns. This is not scalable.

As such, we released the Threat Actor profile feature, which is available in Flashpoint Ignite for CTI and PSI users. The feature builds an auto-generated high-level dossier that gives customers a fast understanding of a malicious actor’s lifestyle, including their aliases, online communities they visit, and actions over time.

6. Brand Intelligence

Flashpoint Brand Intelligence is a proactive solution that detects and monitors for brand abuse, impersonations, and malicious content across domains, logos, social media, and mobile apps. Managing your brand’s online reputation is crucial as it has a direct impact on your bottom line.

Not only do consumers check reviews, news sources, and social media to conduct research before purchasing or contacting vendors, threat actors are also looking for avenues to profit off of your digital likeness. By creating lookalike domains, fake social profiles, or spoofed mobile apps, malicious actors can target potential customers or your own employees via typosquatting and phishing—which can result in severe reputational and financial losses. Using Brand Intelligence, our customers are able to detect brand-related threats early and swiftly take down malicious URLs. Doing so helps prevent potential data breaches and helps maintain stakeholder trust.

7. FNSS advisory board

Flashpoint has also provided great value to government agencies and teams via Flashpoint National Security Solutions (FNSS). In summer we announced the formation of our public sector advisory board comprising of four national security leaders:

• Lt Gen. Scott Howell
• Andrew Makridis
• Matthew Swenson
• Tim Newberry

FNSS serves the unique needs of national security organizations, collaborating closely with teams within defense, federal law enforcement, federal civilian agencies, state and local government, and the intelligence community. Our aim is to elevate global situational awareness and facilitate mission success by harnessing cutting-edge technology and leveraging our best-in-class data collections. We’ve also recently announced a groundbreaking partnership with Scale AI which will further empower our government clients with ai-enhanced threat intelligence.

8. Physical Security Intelligence

Timely and actionable data is critical for protecting people, assets, and infrastructure. To assist our government clients, Flashpoint has introduced several innovations and improvements to our physical security intelligence capabilities, as part of the Ignite platform.

As such, we have been hard at work gathering and making available our vast collection of open source data, which enables security teams to derive meaningful insights. Our open-source intelligence (OSINT) capabilities  have helped our customers address a wide range of challenges, from improving their global situational awareness, responding to crisis events, and managing supply chain disruptions, to becoming aware of impending physical attacks and insider threats.

9. Mapping intelligence reports in Echosec

Additionally, we integrated Flashpoint Intelligence Reports into Echosec—allowing users to better navigate through myriad intelligence reports, while also displaying them according to the affected geographic region.

This feature has driven immediate value for analysts, investigators, and non-technical users, acting as a force multiplier that enables them to seek and comprehend evolving global situations.

10. Flashpoint Firehose

The Flashpoint Firehose is a data-as-a-service solution that delivers a constant stream of data from various sources., The Firehose pulls vital data  from social media platforms, messaging apps, or illicit communities across Asia Pacific , Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Using the Firehose, our customers have been able to pull key segments of data into their own infrastructure without having to query APIs. This has enabled them to train or build large language models, enabling product development. This has been especially critical for our OEM partners.

The Flashpoint Firehose: 5 Questions With Michael Raypold, VP of Engineering

Protect your organization with Flashpoint

2023 marks an exciting year of innovation and progress at Flashpoint. With the launch of Flashpoint Ignite and the development of its state-of-the-art features, we’ve redefined the standards of threat, vulnerability, and physical intelligence.

While our products continue to innovate the market, our customer community also grows, enabling our users to collaborate and share their expertise with one another and with us—helping us continue our mission to empower our customers to make critical decisions that keep people and assets safe.

As we look to the future, we remain dedicated to innovate, to empower, and to protect. Stay tuned in the coming year to see how we continue to put the needs of our customers first in navigating the complexities of the threat landscape. Get a demo today to see any of these products or features in action.