2022 Reflections: The Year of ZFOX

ZeroFox was the only cybersecurity company to go public in 2022, and we owe it all to our fellow foxes, customers, investors, partners, and believers around the world.

Last year was marked by growth, commitment, and purpose. ZeroFox was founded with a vision for a safer digital world, and we’ve spent the better part of the last ten years continuing to bring that vision to life. We work with some of the largest and most highly targeted brands, financial institutions, enterprises, and public sector organizations in the world to protect them from threats outside the perimeter. We grew our external cybersecurity platform to provide a unified, end-to-end solution for addressing all external threats pre- and post-breach. We combined leading AI technology for faster, continuous intelligence collection with a team of expert analysts, researchers, and breach responders to deliver full scale protection, intelligence, disruption, and response services. In doing so, we are not only protecting our own customers, their brands, people, and data, but our customers' customers. 

This time last year, we announced our intentions to merge with L&F Acquisition Corp, acquire IDX, raise growth capital, and become a public company. And now, we are entering 2023 as the first and only cybersecurity company to go public last year. This past year has been marked by growth milestones, as we expanded our services to protect more customers globally, celebrated our listing on Nasdaq, integrated IDX into the ZeroFox ecosystem, and brought new technology to our collective clientbase as a result of that integration. Through it all, we have remained committed to our singular vision of a safer digital world. 

The Highlight Reel

2022 was a year to remember. We ended the calendar year with record ARR, subscription customers, and employees dispersed throughout the world.

ZeroFox Intelligence released research on dark web actors, ransomware groups, and other threat activity that Forbes, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg (among many others) picked up. And personally, with four children, I also hit a new record for number of changed diapers in a calendar year.

In the Fox Den

We talk a lot about ZeroFox’s technology because it is the AI engine that powers everything we do – but it is the people, our foxes, that are truly the heart and soul of ZeroFox. We left 2022 with more than 800 foxes worldwide: intelligence analysts, research and development engineers, operations managers, and more, collectively protecting our customers 24x7x365. 

We celebrated professional and personal milestones, from promotions, to anniversaries - but the best celebration of all was listing day, as foxes globally rang the bell and shared the news that ZeroFox became the only cybersecurity company to go public in 2022.

I am immensely grateful to work with the ZeroFox team who embody a culture of curiosity, adaptability, and the relentless pursuit of perfection when it comes to our customers. It’s only through the collective efforts of our team that all this was possible. As we head into 2023, I could not be more confident in the team we have in place to make this next year just as impactful.

THE Unified External Cybersecurity Platform

In 2022, we focused on growing our external cybersecurity platform to effectively expose, disrupt, and respond to threats outside the perimeter. This year marked a rise in impersonations, phishing attacks, breaches, and other malicious activity, making continuous threat exposure management across digital platforms a necessity for security teams. 

Three key themes we focused on this year: innovation, iteration, integration. Our technology team spent the past 12 months investing in new artificial-intelligence-powered technologies to enhance the ZeroFox Platform across our four pillars of Protection, Intelligence, Disruption, and Response. We continued to invest in platform improvements to reduce online noise and find more threats faster. With our August acquisition of IDX, we are now integrating IDX’s leading breach notification and response services into the broader ZeroFox tech stack. Integration is critical for the modern security team, and we are constantly seeking opportunities to improve workflows and streamline systems for our customers, whether through integrated intelligence feeds, our Global Disruption Network, or automating protection playbooks.

We’ve made substantial investments in each of the four pillars of our platform. Here are some highlights:

• Protection: Continued to expand our leadership in Digital Risk Protection (DRP) with significant technology advances to support in-demand use cases, including domain and brand monitoring, phishing and fraud detection, impersonation and account takeover protection, dark web leak detection, compromised credential monitoring, physical security intelligence, and execution protection.
• Disruption: Building on our scalable and proven takedown capabilities with increased automation and expansion of our Global Disruption Network made up of hundreds of hosts, registrars, data providers, data brokers, and partners to remove malicious content, domains, and assets from the internet.
• Intelligence: Expanded how our customers can leverage and access our expansive intelligence data lake in the ZeroFox Platform using robust alerting, Intelligence Search, and dozens of intelligence feeds with broad API coverage for identity and fraud, network and vulnerability, covert communications, and botnet intelligence. Our customers now also have one-click access to our global team of Intelligence experts to assist investigations or assessments, making us a part of their security team.
• Response: With the acquisition of IDX, we became one of the nation's largest breach response providers, working with some of the largest cyber law firms and cyber insurance companies to provide breach notification, call centers, privacy protection, incident response, dark web monitoring, and more. We ended the year expanding existing breach response services to multinational companies who have suffered a data breach with impacted people living outside the United States.

As we plan for 2023, we will continue to innovate to stay ahead of the ever-evolving attacker to provide a unified external cybersecurity platform to effectively mitigate and manage risks outside the perimeter. 

The Year Ahead

With 2022 behind us, I am immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished last year, and what we’ve built over the last decade at ZeroFox. 2023 marks a year of notable milestones including our 10 year anniversary.

We can’t know for certain what 2023 will bring, for the global economy or the external threat landscape. But ZeroFox was built to adapt to a changing threat environment. When our customers face an uncertain road ahead, they have and will continue to be able to rely upon ZeroFox. We will never stop our relentless pursuit of perfection - we will protect our customers. 

Onward and upward, cheers to the New Year.

Editor's note: This article first appeared on LinkedIn and can be viewed here.

Tags: Cyber Trends, External Cybersecurity, Leadership