Summary
Ethiack needed a door-opener into a new geography. The Portuguese ethical-hacking platform was entering the UK market and wanted a single research asset credible enough to carry the brand into UK financial press without hiring a local PR firm to write it.
We produced the UK FinTech Digital Exposure Report, a data-led scan of 788 UK FinTech companies and 56K+ exposed digital assets. The report surfaced that 43% of FinTechs expose server software type and version in HTTP headers (reconnaissance goldmine), and ~20% use outdated or misconfigured SSL certificates. City AM and Yahoo Finance ran the story. Two supporting blog posts on the Ethiack Blog set up the angle and the UK launch.
Challenge
Entering a new geography as a foreign security vendor is hard. UK financial press does not cover Portuguese ethical-hacking platforms out of courtesy, and UK FinTech security teams have plenty of local vendors to call before they take a call from Lisbon. Ethiack needed a reason to be interesting, not a vendor-of-the-week pitch.
The research had to solve two problems at once: demonstrate that Ethiack's platform finds real exposure at scale, and give UK business press a fresh story angle they could quote without rewriting. Most vendor "state of industry" reports fail the second test because the methodology is too thin to withstand a journalist checking the numbers.
And it had to land without PR filler. Editorial copy that opens with "as leaders in the ethical hacking space, we are thrilled to announce" gets spiked by every tier-1 editor who reads the first line. The copy had to do the proving and stay out of its own way.
Approach
We wrote a data-led report. Ethiack's platform scanned 788 UK FinTech companies across 56K+ digital assets (websites, servers, cloud services) and produced ground-truth findings on exposure posture. The write-up surfaced the specific numbers: 43% exposing server software, ~20% with expired or misconfigured SSL certificates, and the implication for reconnaissance-led attacks.
The editorial package was structured for tier-1 financial press, not security trades. City AM and Yahoo Finance readers are not ingesting CVE numbers; they want to know which financial services companies might be carrying a cyber risk and what "cyber risk" actually looks like in plain English. The copy gave them pull-quotes ready to lift, plus a quotable line from Ethiack's CEO on the lock-and-key metaphor for HTTP header exposure.
Supporting blog posts on the Ethiack Blog (AI-Backed Hackers Are Targeting FinTech and Get Hacked by the Right People: Ethiack Enters the UK) set up the narrative before the report dropped and carried the UK-launch message for the existing Ethiack audience.
Results
City AM ran the story (A third of UK FinTechs put customer data at risk of cyber attack) with Ethiack's CEO quoted on the specific lock-and-key metaphor. Yahoo Finance ran the City AM piece via syndication, pulling UK financial services readers who do not typically see Ethiack content. Financeday.co.uk and UPTEC (Ethiack's incubator portfolio) also picked up the findings.
For Ethiack's UK launch, the report translated directly into GTM leverage. Sales reps had a single URL they could send UK FinTech prospects that did more work than a deck, and UK editors had a source they could call for follow-up commentary as fintech cyber stories evolved.
Qualitatively, it answered the geography question. A Portuguese vendor with a UK-specific research asset that UK business press respects is not a Portuguese vendor anymore; it is a vendor that understands the market it is entering.