Problem: Businesses often don’t prepare for social black swan events (like COVID19).
Solution: A business that’s designed to penetrate and exploit the weaknesses through using social engineering. Companies would hire this firm to extract information, simulate extreme circumstances, and attempt to find weaknesses in corporate and organizational structure before malicious actors could. Already, this exists in the world of cybersecurity through Red Teaming. As described by Jeremiah Talamantes:
Red Teaming is a full-scope, multi-layered attack simulation designed to measure how well a company’s people and networks, applications and physical security controls can withstand an attack from a real-life adversary.
The purpose of hiring a “Red Team” is to find flaws before they create a make-or-break scenario for the business. This company would serve as a “devils advocate” for all of your red teaming needs beyond cybersecurity. In theory business would hire this business before making large-scale product changes. To make the business even more innovative, it could adopt a gig-teaming model whereby anyone can sign up to be on a red team that targets a corporation. Then, experienced hackers could be paired with corporations to “white hat” social hacker.
This idea was in part inspired by the Wired story published yesterday (5/12/2020) on Marcus Hutchins, the 22-year-old white hat hacker who stopped the WannaCry malware attack.
Monetization: Consulting fees, perhaps a “Red Teaming Subscription,” or
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)