With many thanks to SEON’s CEO, Tamás Kadar, Aviva Zacks had the wonderful opportunity to find out all about his company’s Intelligence Tool and Sense Platform.
Safety Detectives: Tell me how you got started in the cybersecurity industry and what you love about it.
Tamás Kadar: At first we thought of entering the crypto market and started the first fiat exchange platform for Central and Eastern Europe. However, we were shocked to witness our digital assets’ safety got compromised by fraudsters and we quickly found out that there were no adequate security firms to help out with this issue.
The solution we came up with was to effectively secure certain digital assets from fraudsters and expand it into a viable business. This is what led us to create SEON Technologies and channel its growth to this day.
SD: What is SEON’s flagship product?
TK: We offer two virtual products: The Intelligence Tool and Sense Platform. Our intelligence tool helps our customers enrich their user’s IP, email, or phone data with social media information to aid risk decision making. This essentially allows them to have a 360 view of their customers and to filter out fraud attempts with a click of a button.
The Sense Platform itself is an end-to-end fraud management system that uses machine learning to spot sophisticated fraud attacks on signups, during transactions, or within the context of promotional programs.
SD: How does your company compete with other cybersecurity companies in the same space?
TK: Technically speaking, artificial intelligence and supervised machine learning are a major part of our solutions.
This gives our tools a competitive edge. They allow us to keep adapting new methods because fraudsters are always trying something new. If we had adopted the approach that other companies use we would not be nearly as successful as we have been. What’s more, our clients come from diverse industries, from igaming to online lending to travel.
SD: What is the worst cyberthreat today?
TK: The amount of fraud being experienced has dramatically increased and many businesses are ill-experienced to fend off these threats.
The Covid-19 outbreak has forced many industries to adapt to different ways of operating. Physical became virtual. Many businesses were forced to go online to stay afloat. Over recent months, we’ve seen certain retailers prosper and others struggle, but at the end of the day, nearly all have had to alter the way they do business.
This sudden shift to digitalization has changed the way we combat a rising number of fraudsters and cyber threats. As virtual stores are booming, unfortunately so is online fraud, as criminals can leverage the same digital technologies to scale their operations.
SD: How do you see cybersecurity developing now that we are living through this pandemic?
TK: There seems to be a sore awakening going on, that despite the fact that there have been talks for years about going digital, it seems as if key players and entities are still unprepared for the risks that lie in operating online. It’s the same for the cybersecurity industry: we’ve been pretty set on meeting demand for “known” fraud threats, and yet now there are a whole lot of new challenges—for example, that of synthetic identities or SIM swapping attacks that need to be tackled.