'Reputational cybercrimes increased by over 700%' amid pandemic: INTELIQORE Co-Founder

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INTELIQORE Co-Founder Flynn Adams, who is also the daughter of actress Jane Seymour, joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to break down how she is working to fight cyber crime.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SEANA SMITH: With millions of students back at school, it's putting a focus on bullying and also cyber safety. And cybersecurity firm INTELIQORE, they're launching a new platform. It's called Tripp. And it gives the kids the ability to report cyber-harassment and to do so in real time.

So we want to talk a little bit more about this. And for that, we want to bring in Flynn Adams, co-founder of INTELIQORE. And Flynn, it's good to have you. Thanks so much for joining us today. This is such an important subject for us to discuss and certainly at this time when so many kids are going back to school. But just tell us about Tripp and exactly what you hope this platform achieves and how you hope it better protects children against cyber bullying.

FLYNN ADAMS: Of course. If I can take just a second to just to frame it around my personal narrative, I think it'll sort of comprehensively give an identity so to what it is that we do. But I'm a woman in cybersecurity and I have a famous parent. And I have a unique situation of having to acknowledge that the internet is not and has not ever been my friend. But even I, no one is impervious to this problem.

And even I made some critical mistakes that I think everyone, including parents right now, can relate to, which is how quickly these unmanaged abuse incidents can actually turn into very, very real threats of violence. And in my situation, I was working at the time as a high-ranking executive at a well-known technology company. And there were two people in particular who-- they kind of bypassed the normal vectors of abuse that I was used to, I'm a stupid woman. I don't deserve my job.

And they went right into creating fake accounts pretending to be me, my husband, other family members, our businesses. I mean, these are impersonating accounts that so many young people today even experience. But for me, these individuals went so far as to post my home address where they advertised services where-- I'm sorry. Incredibly dangerous people showed up at my front door intent on doing very real harm to me and to my family.

And the motivating work that I do was really about acknowledging that, even when people like me have access that others don't to be able to contact heads of security and law enforcement at these platforms, that none of us are really able to get the resolution we need or to establish enforceable consequences. And the premise around the work that I do with INTELIQORE and the tools that we're building with Tripp is about allowing individuals to establish their own boundaries for their own sense of safety, not to allow machines, algorithms, machine learning to make those decisions for you.

And we're doing that by establishing a protocol that standardizes the process by which you can capture an event when it happens and preserve it using evidentiary-grade data and forensically preserved.

ADAM SHAPIRO: And you're doing this for free. What you've just described, it sends chills down the spines of lots of people. There's this TV show now, "Clickbait." I don't know if you've seen it on Netflix. But it's kind of a little bit more what you just described. It's horrifying.

And yet this is also happening with children, people stealing their data. So for the parents watching right now, how does what you're providing help protect our kids?

FLYNN ADAMS: Sure so because Tripp is an evolving solution to an evolving problem, we're releasing it in phases. Right now, what's available is really the entry point to your self-advocacy for safety. It's a very, very simple Chrome extension that anyone can use.

And we developed our own set of metadata that is relevant to your personal sense of safety. More importantly, it captures the right information in the right way, required by law enforcement to establish the credibility of an incident. So again, not every incident needs to escalate to the level of prosecuting a crime. But the reality is what we're seeing, especially with children, is you never, ever, ever know when a situation is going to escalate or get worse.

So as a best practice, we always say, capture what you see. Do it in the right way so that you can take back control.

SEANA SMITH: And Flynn, how do you think COVID has exacerbated some of these problems? Because we know so many kids have not been in school over the last, what, 16 months. We're starting to see children returned to the classrooms. But they were spending more and more time online during that time. So I guess, how much bigger of a problem has this gotten over the past year and a half?

FLYNN ADAMS: I think people would actually be surprised to know that even in that brief period, reputational cybercrime specifically increased by over 700%. We took for granted that we were all home. But the other people who were home were cyber criminals intent on weaponizing technology as a way to cause harm to us, to loved ones, and especially our children.

And one of the most critical things that we learned during that process was, especially now with kids going back to school, that it is so important that, as parents, you take the steps necessary to really know what your children are doing and, more importantly, to be able to help educate them on the realities of the permanence of some of the things that they say and do online.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Flynn, if a parent is watching right now, where do they go to actually get this tool? Because trip.com is not the destination.

FLYNN ADAMS: Yeah, sorry. We're a cyber-security company. So we do other cyber-security work. But for purposes of this product, you go to INTELIQORE.com. And there's a button at the top of the screen that says Capture Now. And it'll take you through a set of simple instructions. And you can download the Chrome extension right then and there.

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