Secretive GCHQ Funded Company, TurgenSec Acquired

TurgenSec, an alumni company of the UK’s NCSC accelerator programme, known for responsibly disclosing data breaches to the largest companies and governments has been acquired by an unknown party.

When reached for comment TurgenSec’s CEO, Nathaniel Fried, said “We started TurgenSec to empower British companies and western governments with offensive intelligence capabilities on par or better than those used against them by China and Russia.”

Fried continued “To stay ahead of today’s threats you need to understand your infrastructure and human attack surface. You need to know how much it changes over time and critically, you need to understand the weakest points in your infrastructure.

You don’t need an endless stream of fingerprint driven CVE alerts, you need actionable intelligence focused on where attackers would actually target you.”

Since 2019, TurgenSec has provided digital risk protection and threat intelligence services to customers with disparate and complex attack surfaces. Founded by Nathaniel Fried, Peter and Dr. Alex Tarter it grew out of the National Cyber Security Centre’s accelerator in Cheltenham.

It garnered early publicity responsibly disclosing mistakenly open databases in companies such as Virgin Media, Rolls Royce and Samsung. TurgenSec even caused a stir in the Philippines Government when they disclosed a data breach of their Office of the Solicitor General which resulted in the leaking of hundreds of thousands critical national security documents.

Alongside their disclosures, TurgenSec has developed a stack of open source intelligence (OSINT) capabilities for both offensive and defensive use cases. Selling these services to FTSE 100 companies and through third parties to governments.

When reached for comment on who acquired them and what their future plans were, TurgenSec directed us towards their website, turgensec.com.

This acquisition follows a long trend of UK defence and information security companies being acquired by Private Equity and American cyber security companies. Such as KnowBe4, a UK based security awareness training company that was bought by Vista Equity Partners in October 2022.

Content Source: TechRound