Optery Triumphs with Triple Win at 2025 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards

Summary:

• Optery won in three categories at the 2025 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, covering attack surface management, digital footprint management and employee privacy.
• It is the second year in a row the company has won in all three of those categories.
• Optery’s business finds and removes employee and executive personal data from data broker sites.
• Paul Mander, GM at Optery for Business, says the wins show PII removal is now seen as core security.

A Triple Win at the 2025 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards

Optery announced on March 10, 2025, that it had been named a winner in three categories of the 2025 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards: Attack Surface Management, Digital Footprint Management and Employee Privacy Protection. It is the second consecutive year the San Francisco company has won in those three categories.

The awards, organized by Cybersecurity Insiders, recognize companies, products and professionals in information security. Holger Schulze, the group’s founder, noted that 2025 marked 10 years of the program.

Why Exposed Employee Data Is a Security Risk

Optery focuses on personal data that data brokers post online, such as home addresses and phone numbers. Attackers use that information for phishing and other social engineering, credential theft and ransomware. The company offers IT teams a self-service platform for finding and removing employees’ personal information from the web.

“The recently leaked Black Basta chat logs have revealed how modern cyber threat actors operate, using employee info from data broker databases to identify targets and facilitate cyber attacks,” said Paul Mander, GM at Optery for Business.

How the Service Works

Optery offers a free report with screenshots showing where a person’s information appears on data broker sites. Paid plans remove customers from those sites automatically, and the company provides before-and-after reports as evidence.

It has SOC 2 Type II certification, the company says. PCMag.com has named it an Editors’ Choice for personal data removal in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

What Optery Says About the Wins

Mander said companies that ignore their data broker exposure leave employees and executives vulnerable. He said the wins reflect growing recognition that removing PII is now a must-have security measure.

It’s a big user base. Optery says hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of businesses now use the service to keep their details off broker sites.

What It Means for Security Teams

There’s a bigger shift here. Security teams are starting to treat employees’ personal data as part of the company’s attack surface, because attackers use it to pick and research targets. Removing that data from broker sites makes phishing and impersonation harder.

For organizations, the practical step is to check how much of their staff’s information is exposed online, starting with executives and people who handle payments or IT access.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.