Kevin Gosschalk’s Arkose Labs boasts of many defences against hackers – including the “original internet Godfather”.
Kevin Gosschalk wants to make cybercriminals give up their day jobs, so occasionally he hires them.
Founded in 2016, the California-headquartered business has attracted clients such as Microsoft and Paypal, which are also among the investors to have poured in $180 million and fuelled revenue growth of 1480 per cent in 2021-22.That funding also helped Gosschalk this year audaciously create the role of “chief criminal officer” at Arkose, and fill it with Brett Johnson, one of the world’s most infamous cybercriminals.
While studying games design at the Queensland University Of Technology, Gosschalk had specialised in computer vision – the field of artificial intelligence that aims to build machines that can process, analyse and interpret visual data like humans can.
“The problem with character recognition tests, or those ones where you have to click which squares have a picture of traffic lights in them or whatever – these are valuable problems for a computer to be able to solve in all sorts of scenarios, so there are off-the-shelf bots available to hackers that can beat them,” Gosschalk says.
Using a suite of traffic classification tools – “we can tell if you’re coming from a cheap ISP in Russia,” Gosschalk says – Arkose was able to vastly reduce Kik’s rate of “false positives”, where a genuine user suffers the inconvenience of facing a CAPTCHA. Gosschalk had no shortage of meeting requests on a visit back to Australia in early October, in the wake of the. Arkose could not have prevented the hack – its software is not involved in network security – but its policing of sign-ups and log-ins could reduce the fallout.