Interview with Michael Tiffany, Co-Founder and President of White Ops

White Ops is a cybersecurity company fighting the cyber crimes of scale, especially the ones using bots, botnets, or millions of infected devices. We defend companies against bot attacks. We defend e-commerce companies who want to sell their limited release products or tickets to real people, not scalpers using bots to buy out everything in the first minute of a release.

We defend media and recommendation algorithms from being manipulated by fake page views, plays, like, and listens. We defend the digital advertising ecosystem, from advertisers to publishers and the platforms in between, from fraud. We help enterprises engage with real humans, and we support the trust and integrity of Internet marketplaces with independent validation.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
My cofounders and I wanted to see if we could fight cybercrime at the incentives level. What could we achieve by disrupting the biggest profit centers of cybercrime? If we could decrease the profitability of the most scalable cybercrimes, they would become less attractive in general, changing our cybercriminal adversaries’ incentives instead of just pushing them back to find different victims.

Could that work? Can we make people more secure by making them less attractive victims? That was the curiosity and the ambition that got us started.
 

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

 
Make your future self proud of how you spent your time. There are infinite ways of making money, some more meaningful than others. You should pursue a mission that is worthy enough that you will feel proud of having spent the precious time of your life working towards it, even if it never leads to fame or fortune. That is a high bar. But if you aim for that bar, it will improve your life and the lives of everyone you come to employ.

As an entrepreneur, you are a job creator. If you succeed, are you going to create meaningful jobs, or simply jobs that make money? Are your people going to feel proud of how they spent their time working for the company you started, even if it never makes them rich or famous? Make your jobs meaningful. Start with yours.
 

What can we hope to see from White Ops in the future?

 
Expect us to break more news this year, and a lot more next year! For a lot of our deployments, we operate like a silent alarm, catching the bad guys without immediately tipping them off that we’ve done so. Some cybercriminal operations we are fending off right now will become pretty awesome takedown operations in the future, and on the other side of those takedowns, we often get to talk about them publicly.