Common Defense has launched as an AI-native cybersecurity company designed to protect organizations from AI-powered social engineering attacks, phishing, deepfake voice and video calls, accou
Common Defense has launched as an AI-native cybersecurity company designed to protect organizations from AI-powered social engineering attacks, phishing, deepfake voice and video calls, account takeovers and impersonation, across every communication channel employees use.
Common Defense was built by Quantstamp, a leading cybersecurity company that has secured more than $500 billion in digital assets across 1,300+ audit engagements.
The timing is not incidental. On August 31, Financial Stability Board chair Andrew Bailey warned G20 finance ministers that AI's impact on cyber risk is the most immediate concern for the global financial system, saying the technology could change the speed, scale and economics of an attack, according to Reuters.
Bailey, who also serves as Bank of England governor, added that many countries still lack adequate protocols to manage advanced AI models.
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Quantstamp spent more than nine years securing the code and infrastructure layer of fintech and blockchain systems. As the security of these software systems improved, hackers increasingly shifted their focus to the people controlling access, assets, and critical decisions. Key compromise, signer manipulation, phishing, and deepfake voice and video attacks have become major sources of loss.
The problem is not limited to blockchain and fintech. AI companies, fintech and payments firms, and other organizations where employees control valuable systems, data, funds, or accounts face the same risk: strong technical defenses can still fail when an attacker successfully manipulates a person. Common Defense was built to defend that human layer.
Common Defense's core product is what it calls a Communications Firewall, an AI-powered system that monitors email, messaging apps, social platforms, professional networks and voice and video calls for signs of social engineering.
It identifies phishing, impersonation, account takeover, scams, and other suspicious communications before they become security incidents. The company’s models are trained on a large database of scams to detect threats with high precision, low latency, and strong privacy protections.
The company also offers incident response for organizations facing active hacks and security incidents, including compromised accounts, stolen signing keys, phishing attacks and scams, data and source-code leaks, ransomware, and AI-powered social engineering.
When a company suspects it has been hacked, Common Defense helps contain the breach, determine how the attacker got in, remove the threat, restore operations, and harden systems against the same attack happening again.
The need for that kind of response infrastructure is growing. In May, the IMF published an analysis warning that AI is making cyberattacks against financial institutions faster, more frequent and harder to detect, adding that the technology is reshaping cyber risk across the entire financial sector.
Common Defense's founding team includes security researchers with experience across Quantstamp, ByteDance, Stanford and red-team work involving OpenAI and Anthropic. Members have contributed to security research including the OWASP LLM Top 10 and PentestGPT.
The company's launch signals that the cybersecurity industry is beginning to treat AI-powered social engineering not as a niche problem but as a primary attack vector, one that sits alongside, and increasingly ahead of, traditional software exploits.
“At Quantstamp, we spent years securing smart contracts and infrastructure, and we saw attackers increasingly shift their focus to people,” said Richard Ma, Founder of Quantstamp. “We built Common Defense to address that emerging layer of risk: the identities, accounts, and communications attackers target when technical defenses hold.”
Common Defense is available now to organizations across AI and machine learning, Web3, fintech, payments, and other security-sensitive industries.
To strengthen your company’s defenses against attackers, visit commondefense.ai. If your company has been hacked, phished, scammed, or compromised, contact the Common Defense incident response team.
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