Still leading the way
What this means for you
Assetnote was acquired by Searchlight Cyber in 2025. Since then, our teams have worked closely to combine the value of Searchlight’s visibility into attacker behavior with Assetnote’s exposure management capabilities.
If you’re an existing Assetnote customer, our commitment to the technology, the team behind it, and our preemptive mission remains unchanged. Our customers continue to get the same pre-disclosure research and continuous ASM protection, delivered by the Searchlight platform.
Meet the team
Searchlight Cyber is built by a mission driven team
Our leadership team are experts in cybersecurity, attack surface management, the dark web, law enforcement, and defense.
Michael Gianarakis
CEO at Searchlight Cyber
Michael Gianarakis is CEO of Searchlight Cyber, a leader in premptive cybersecurity. With over a decade in the security industry, Michael has built and led offensive security teams across Asia Pacific and Japan. In 2018 he co-founded Assetnote, a pioneering attack surface management platform acquired by Searchlight Cyber in 2025 – bringing best-in-class ASM capability into the PTEM platform. Michael is a respected security researcher and has presented at DEF CON, Black Hat Asia, BSides Las Vegas, Hack in the Box, AusCERT, Thotcon, 44Con, and OWASP.
Shubham Shah
Chief Security Research Officer at Searchlight Cyber
Shubham Shah is Chief Security Research Officer, having joined Searchlight Cyber following the acquisition of Assetnote, where he was Co-Founder and CTO. Shubham leads the global security research team whose findings feed directly into Searchlight Exposure – surfacing zero-day vulnerabilities in the tools organisations rely on, often months ahead of public disclosure. He remains a prolific bug bounty hunter ranked in the top 50 hackers on HackerOne, and has presented at various industry events including QCon London, Kiwicon, AusCert, BSides Canberra, and CrikeyCon.
Timothy Hunt
VP of Customer Success at Searchlight Cyber
Timothy Hunt is the Vice President of Customer Success at Searchlight Cyber, where he leads the customer success function across the business. With over a decade in the information security industry, Tim has built and led global teams, which help organizations of all sizes understand their risk, strengthen their security programs, and get measurable value from their security investments.
Key Capabilities
ASM that just works
Discover everything on your attack surface
Web applications, APIs, cloud infrastructure, DNS, certificates, and subdomains, discovered and validated across the whole external surface, so exposure is proven wherever it lives, not just on the assets that were easy to find.
Only what's real reaches you
Searchlight automatically cross-references your assets, including the versions you're running, to verify an exposure is legitimate before alerting your team. You only hear about the exposures that are genuinely exploitable and exposed, not the ones that aren't.
Know it's closed, the moment you fix it
Re-run the original exploit the instant you've remediated, and watch it fail, no waiting for the next scheduled scan while attackers move in hours. Every action is logged, so each exposure is tested, resolved, and recorded with a clear audit trail.
Send findings straight for remediation
Every finding is proven before it lands, so confirmed exposures route straight into Splunk, Jira, and your SIEM or SOAR. The signal is strong enough that some customers send critical ones to engineering with no human review in between.
96%faster discovery and validation than other vendors
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Searchlight Cyber is a leader in preemptive cybersecurity. Founded in 2017 to support criminal investigation teams in conducting secure investigations on the dark web, the company later made the same law-enforcement-grade intelligence available to enterprises, so they could see who is targeting them. In 2025, Searchlight acquired the leading exposure validation platform, Assetnote, to enhance its customers’ ability to identify and respond to the highest-priority threats. Since then, the company has acquired the cyber risk company, Intangic, and continues to be at the forefront of preemptive cybersecurity, conducting research into hidden criminal activity and uncovering zero-day vulnerabilities in some of the most widely used enterprise software.
Searchlight Exposure, formerly Assetnote, is an external attack surface platform that continuously discovers and validates where organizations are exposed. Searchlight Threat automatically monitors hard to reach sources across the clear, deep, and dark web to identify when attackers are targeting your organization. Both are powered by our expert research into vulnerabilities and attacker behavior. Together, they enable security teams to know what’s exposed and what’s critical – meaning security teams are able to identify and remediate their most critical threats before they become incidents.
Preemptive Threat Exposure Management helps security teams find, validate, and prioritize exposures before they become incidents. It combines visibility into your external attack surface with real-world threat context, so teams can focus on what attackers are actually targeting.