Letter from the CEO

Patrick Kim, CEO and Founder of Uppsala Security

As we welcome 2020, I am happy to share that Uppsala Security has made huge strides towards becoming a trusted cybersecurity partner for businesses and governments around the globe. We have uniquely positioned ourselves to be the leaders in cybersecurity in terms of protecting digital assets for both businesses and individuals.

In the second half of 2019, our focus was squarely on Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT). We formed alliances through partnerships while delivering compliant cybersecurity solutions. Although we were born in the blockchain space, we have evolved a lot in a relatively short period of time. Today, we are aligned with the FATF guidelines to support various finance industry players as well as individuals using digital assets.

My vision of the future involves the next generation AML, which I coin as Cyber Anti-Money Laundering (C-AML), where AML becomes a part of cybersecurity in digital currency formation that requires a cybersecurity perspective and measurement. I believe that digital financial crime and AML should be addressed under a cybersecurity perspective in more efficient ways. A Mckinsey article reports that in 2017 alone, private companies spent about $8.2 billion USD on AML. Financial crime and fraud finally have merged and become one in the age of cybersecurity.

World Leaders at Conferences

Cryptocurrencies remained the hottest topic in 2019 and I personally believe this will continue through the next decade. Indeed, there is growing interest in building cyber resilience using decentralized financial technologies — and we are responding. Our work this year was centered around AML, CFT, and investor protections — which were the main agenda items at the G20 summit in Fukuoka, Japan, earlier in June.

Coinciding with the G20 was the V20 summit, which Uppsala Security participated in. The summit brought together leading digital asset exchanges and representatives from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to develop a coordinated response to address risks from virtual currencies. The FATF standards were recently updated to include virtual currencies. While technological innovations including blockchain delivered huge benefits to both businesses and individuals, we must remain vigilant of risks to investor protection, AML and CFT.

Mostly recently, we were invited to ministerial “No Money For Terror“ conference on counter-terrorism funding in Melbourne, Australia! We shared our thoughts on the best regulatory approaches to cover potential gaps related to virtual currencies. We believe that despite receiving attention from many government bodies and corporate giants, cryptocurrencies do not currently pose a major threat to the global financial system. Together, we can step up efforts to go after bad actors, and help users recover from cyber incidents involving digital assets.

Compliance

Compliance is another big issue around digital currencies. Banks have been tightening Know Your Customer (KYC) due diligence procedures. Due to increasing concerns about money laundering and terrorism financing, banks have been clamping down on accounts owned by crypto exchanges. Some banks have been freezing accounts belonging to large South Korean exchanges such as Bithumb, causing them to disable the creation of new accounts. A new upcoming bill in July 2020 also proposes tighter compliance regulations in South Korea, where the highest number of virtual currency transactions occur daily. I expect this bill will address the heart of these issues.

Our New Partnerships

2019 was a banner year for Uppsala Security’s business partnerships. We have established a total of seven partnerships, of which there are four resellers and four business partners.

We partnered with the following resellers:

• Rivertz: January 2019
• Norma: May 2019
• Octa Solutions: June 2019
• Hexlant: August 2019

We also established business partnerships with:

• Bizkey: March 2019
• Bitberry: March 2019
• Kyber Network: July 2019
• PayProtocol: October 2019

Most notably, Uppsala Security recently made an agreement to collaborate with the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) by joining their API Exchange (APIX) Platform, an online global marketplace that encourages collaboration between financial institutions and fintech companies. AFIN was established by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, and the ASEAN Bankers Association.

New Cybersecurity Product Suite

In addition to these partnerships, we rolled out a new crypto security product suite not only for our business partners, but also to a wider ecosystem of companies, organizations, and individuals concerned about cybersecurity and digital asset protection. Our new product suite, which is compliant with the FATF guidelines, is focused on supporting global AML/CFT efforts and supports my vision of the next generation AML, Cyber Anti-Money Laundering (C-AML).

With the decentralized Threat Reputation Database (TRDB) being the backbone of our product suite, we launched the Crypto Analysis Transaction Visualization (CATV) tool in April. The CATV tool helps users to visually track down stolen digital assets based on wallet transaction histories and the flows of cryptocurrencies through other wallets. We also released an update to the CATV tool (version 2.2.0) in May.

At the same time, we launched the Interactive Cooperation Framework API v2.0 (ICF API v2). This API provides a standardized cybersecurity framework for everyone to use when exchanging the latest security threat information, making threat information exchange as quick and seamless as ever.

In Q4 2019, we launched a new machine learning tool that uses pattern recognition to assess risks associated with an unknown crypto address. We call this tool the Crypto Analysis Risk Assessment (CARA) and I am extremely excited about its potential among individuals and businesses that want to further automate cybersecurity around digital assets and cryptocurrencies.

Additionally, we are happy to share the availability of our professional service: Summary Wallet Analytical Profiling. Our aim is to deliver customized services to our customers helping them enhance their capabilities for proactively managing risk and regulatory compliance, which is particularly important for being competitive in today’s dynamic age of disruptive technologies. One key benefit of our service is that it helps our clients leverage our curated threat intelligence data to gain analytical insights that enable greater productivity, speed, and improved security towards successfully achieving business goals.

UPPward Finetuning Updates

While we were hard at work launching the CATV, ICF API v2, and CARA, we also continued to finetune the UPPward browser extensions. We are happy to extend the availability of the plug in to Brave Browsers. The extension is now available on Brave, Chrome and Firefox. If you are using UPPward extensions, take a few seconds to make sure you are using the latest version. In the new year, we expect to release the pro versions of these UPPward browser extensions.

The Future: Going Mobile

Our next priorities are to provide a wider variety of coin support in our crypto security solutions such as Bitcoin (BTC) support for the CATV tool by the Q1 2020. After that, we may begin to support some upcoming project such as EOS and Klaytn.

Beyond that, we noticed an increasing adoption of digital payment utilization on mobile devices. I see this as a need to further protect our users’ virtual assets during their crypto transactions on mobile. Therefore, we are venturing into our first very mobile application that provides the ability to run checks against crypto wallet addresses to review their associated risks. All of this is still in progress and we look forward to sharing more updates in the first quarter of 2020.

In a continuous effort, we are conducting ongoing research to enhance detection capabilities of the UPPward browser extensions. Our next product feature, the UPPreward, will also be launched towards the end of Q1 2020 together with some platform visual update.

Last but not least, we are also working on a project that provides enhance cybersecurity protection for crypto user to prevent ransomware, crypto-jacking, and other well-known commodity cyber threats. Stay tuned to more surprises in the new year!