Vetting Prospective Clients with Threat Intel Data
What do you like best?
I've been working in marketing for 10 years now. So far, TIP's products are possibly the easiest I used for conducting background checks on a client's IT infrastructure. For instance, the vendor's products allow uncovering a potential partner's exposed cyber assets with SSL Configuration Analysis API.
The second thing I particularly like about the products is their straightforward user interfaces (UIs) for overall threat intelligence analysis. The dashboard doesn't require much input. Often, only a domain name is required for queries.
What do you dislike?
Perhaps nontechnical users may feel a bit intimidated about the output formats when they first use the products. But they'll soon discover that the benchmarks used in the analyses are in layman's terms. There are also detailed descriptions available on the vendor's site for each output parameter.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I've known through years of experience that a company's reputation is not limited to what people see or know about them. You also have to look at a company's technical infrastructure, as it could paint a very different picture of what goes on internally.
As a digital marketing agency, a great deal of our interaction with clients and third parties occurs online. As we don't always see them face-to-face, we need to establish that these people or companies are 100% reliable. We're all well aware that fraudulent activities are rampant everywhere, so we want to ensure that we're not doing business with the wrong guys. For that purpose, TIP provides us valuable intelligence on potential clients without being too invasive.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We wanted to solve three things before we stumbled upon TIP—vet clients and make sure they're not associated with criminal activities, maintain our excellent reputation, and evaluate new publication partners for our clients. If we were to do all these in a traditional way (e.g., through interviews and surveys), it would all be labor-intensive and time-consuming. We opted for a solution that's easy to integrate, and we haven't looked back since.
TIP's components like SSL Configuration Analysis API, Domain Reputation Scoring API, and Connected Domains API allow us to dig deeper into all public-facing web assets associated with the businesses that approach us. The products are cost-effective and save us time.