Vitali Kremez, CEO of Advanced Intelligence, LLC: Leveraging our unique unparalleled adversarial product “Andariel,” we truly achieve a brighter, safer breach-free and ransomware-free future now!

 “Andariel focus only on providing only primary source proactive intelligence which supports our dual mission of providing threat prevention and loss avoidance solutions to our customer base. This is done through our unique view into the adversarial botnet breach & criminal underground using the adversarial mirrored perspective.”

Advanced Intelligence, LLC is an elite cybersecurity firm that provides primary source adversarial threat detection, fraud intelligence, and advisory solutions for enterprises.

Interview Excerpt: Vitali Kremez

Q. Given that Advanced Intelligence, LLC is the only threat prevention and loss avoidance firm, how uniquely do you offer solutions to your clients?

At Advanced Intelligence (AdvIntel), we focus on providing only primary source proactive intelligence which supports our dual mission of providing threat prevention and loss avoidance solutions to our customer base. This is done through our unique view into the adversarial botnet breach & criminal underground using the adversarial mirrored perspective.

Our proprietary platform, Andariel, provides a mirrored view of criminal activity, which supplies our users with predictive insight that is used to prevent intrusions from maturing into large-scale threat events like ransomware attacks.

Q. Advanced Intelligence provides immediate alerting, applied intelligence, and long-term strategic solutions to help its clients overcome any obstacles posed by the existing and emerging cyber threats. Would you like to elaborate on this a bit more?

Absolutely! We strive to provide our customers with the most actionable, high-fidelity intelligence data that serves both their short-term and long-term needs. To ensure that our customers reap the most benefits from our solutions, we provide a vast array of solutions spanning from robust alerting practices, raw adversarial datasets, contextualized intelligence, and extended intelligence strategies aimed at threat prevention and loss avoidance.

Our alerting practices cover the enterprise level, which can be actioned to de-risk the supply chain through executive-level and third-party monitoring, bolster anti-phishing efforts through domain mimicking detection, as well as uphold brand integrity through account takeover monitoring.

AdvIntel also provides its customers with access to contextualized intelligence that includes insight into threat group indicators of compromise, novel TTPs, and underground monitoring. Our Andariel platform allows our customers to leverage this data through the convenience of integrated API endpoints so as to maintain adversarial awareness.

We offer a wide variety of long-term threat intelligence strategies aimed at threat prevention and loss avoidance. Such solutions include, but are not limited to, initiating domain takedowns to stymie phishing attempts, credential exposure monitoring, and surveying underground chatter which can assist in Vulnerability Management, brand monitoring, and even emerging criminal enterprises.

Q. What are your focus areas? Please share an overview.

At AdvIntel, we focus our energies on providing continuous proactive threat monitoring, including deep visibility into the criminal infrastructure. Our monitoring capabilities involve adversarial awareness into prolific botnet groups, ransomware syndicates, crimeware operators, fraudsters, and more. As part of our early warning monitoring model, we prioritize delivering the highest fidelity adversarial datasets to our customers, which assist in proactively identifying and dissolving threats before they mature into large-scale incidents.

Q. Partnerships make businesses more robust and better. That said, who are your partners, and how do these collaborations help you grow?

Whether we are providing actionable intelligence on the individual or enterprise level, our approach remains the same: we strive to emphasize the human element of threat intelligence. Information sharing is vital in the battle against cybercrime. To this end, we proudly partner with various ISACs and ISAOs to support their sector-specific threat alerting practices. Leveraging our unique adversarial insight within their networked relationships ensures that our capabilities are reaching a much wider audience, which in turn, will assist in building a brighter, safer breach-free and ransomware-free future.

Q. What new endeavors is Advanced Intelligence currently undertaking?

This is an exciting time for our company. We are growing exponentially, that means that we have many ideas on where we would like to see our product and our solutions to go. Our mission is to provide end-users with access to the most high-fidelity adversarial data feeds, thereby further extending our intimate view into adversarial behavior patterns.

Putting investigative power into the hands of our platform users is also something that we are continuously emphasizing. Whether it is through alternate sources of automation, one-on-one training sessions that delve into our platform’s capabilities, or expanding our offerings, we aim to provide our platform users with as many tools as possible to assist in participating in the threat-intelligence-as-threat-prevention model.

Q. Who are your clients? Would you like to share a client success story or two?

There is a universal need for threat prevention and loss avoidance. Our client base reflects this need. Proudly catering to a wide spectrum of clients, including those affiliated with the industries of finance, insurance (with specific emphasis on cyber insurance carriers), healthcare, security, telecommunications, and even professional solutions, we have begun to build a culture of proactive intelligence which has reaped tangible benefits. For example, one of our clients, an organization affiliated with the insurance industry, uses our strategic adversarial vantage point to de-risk their insured customers’ exposure levels.

We also work closely with the security industry, specifically with incident response teams. Our product, Andariel, and our solutions are leveraged to assist in identifying the patient zero in the aftermath of a threat event. Our uniquely positioned insight into the adversarial space allows IR teams to piece together an incident by mapping out the threat actors’ movements within the victim network.

Of course, this information can also be harnessed to serve as a source of predictive awareness into criminal territory. We have had a few instances in which our view into the botnet infrastructure has assisted in identifying potential ransomware victims. We were able to assist the intrusion victims in mitigating the threat before it escalated to a ransomware attack through our early warning monitoring capabilities!

Q. How do you plan to transform your company into a future that is unfolding before you?

As the cybercrime domain continues to evolve, so shall we. To maintain the closest, most intimate view into a threat actor’s frame of mind, we routinely add elements and integrations into our platform and model to add as much value to our customers’ experience as possible. Currently, we have a few irons on the fire that endeavor to carry on this mission, which we are very excited to share with the world in due course!

The Leaders Upfront

Vitali Kremez, CEO & Chairman: Vitali has served as CEO and Chairman of AdvIntel since June 2020, leading the company’s strategic, market, and business operations. He is a renowned cybersecurity expert, malware course author, speaker, blogger, and columnist. Vitali has contributed crucial research and articles to leading publications and is a frequent commentator on cybercrime, hacking incidents, malware, and security.

Kremez is a former cybercrime analyst of the New York County District Attorney’s Office and a former leader of the anti-virus cybersecurity intelligence center. He is now applying this first-hand government and private sector experience to advance AdvIntel’s strategic growth and market expansion.

Yelisey Boguslavskiy, Head of Research:  Yelisey currently oversees the firm’s research and investigative and security operations. He leads AdvIntel’s Security & Development Team, conducting advanced HUMINT and SIGINT investigations into cyber fraud, ransomware, APT threats, political manipulation, and violent extremist propaganda conducted through digital infrastructure.

Boguslavskiy is the author of ‘Security Pragmatism: The Peripheral Alliance’. This non-fiction monograph follows 30 years of security and intelligence cooperation between Turkey, Iran, and Israel from 1947 to 1977 and beyond. Prior to Advanced Intelligence LLC, Yelisey worked as an investigator in the business intelligence community, including Kroll, a division of Duff & Phelps. He holds an M.A. degree in Security Policy Studies from the Elliott School of International Affairs of George Washington University.

Claire McKenzie Robertson, Customer Success Manager: Claire’s time at AdvIntel began as a Threat Analyst where she produced exclusive reporting on specific breach incidents like botnet infections and RDP compromises. Additionally, she engaged in investigations into threat activity presented on top-tier DarkWeb forums. She soon progressed to Intelligence Team Lead where she coordinated the intelligence reporting and weekly duties of the Security and Development Team.

Claire holds an MS in Information Science from SUNY Albany and a BA in Language Studies with a minor in Education from UC Santa Cruz. She is currently completing her MPS in Cybersecurity Risk Management at Georgetown University.

“Our proprietary platform, Andariel, provides a mirrored view of criminal activity, which supplies our users with predictive insight that is used to prevent intrusions from maturing into large-scale threat events like ransomware attacks.”