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Paul Chapman
Retired Entrepreneur
Paul Chapman is a seasoned professional with a diverse background spanning across various industries and roles. He is notably the co-founder and CEO of Aquilai, a cyber intelligence company based in Cheltenham. Aquilai, an alumni of the GCHQ cyber accelerator, specializes in detecting advanced phishing attacks that threaten businesses and their employees.
Highlights
I am delighted to announce that Aquilai has been acquired by Egress Software Technologies. It has been an amazing journey, from the pre-accelerator days of DCMS’s Cyber 101 and Fast forward to Wayra’s GCHQ Cyber Accelerator. It was here we met great founders, who were always open to share their knowledge and experience. We also had a unique access to the best minds within GCHQ and NCSC. With their help and direction my very talented tech team created a world leading technology to secure the human layer against advanced phishing attacks. This technical achievement was recognised by the Leadership Team of Egress, and when the talking started both parties realised there was also a great cultural fit between the teams. This is a great British acquisition success story and I sign off as the CEO of Aquilai knowing that the team and the tech are part of great plans within Egress to create the world’s finest email security defence.
Being the CEO of Aquilai - and responsible for a business whose mission is the detection of advanced phishing attacks its interesting to be targeted as a potential victim.
I am safer than most as we use our phishing defence service internally so I get inserted threat banners to quickly summarise the status of every email as well a user threat display.
This phishing email has come from a compromised email account caused by a credential phishing attack that happened earlier.
Its the most popular attack we see today and the most difficult to detect. It's hard to detect for existing systems as its a trusted email, passed authentication and the standard filters. People will more often trust the message as it comes from a known contact or domain.
Some of you will tell yourself that you wouldn't have fallen for it anyway. But this misses the point - we all "see" things differently. What is obviously phishing to one person isn't to the next. These types of phishing templates do work, and have caused many people to act on the message, click through to a cloned site and give away their password credentials. The resulting cyber breaches have cost weeks of disruption and heavy financial and reputational costs.
The future is not more training but better deception detection. #phishing
