Cybersecurity boss shores up defences for ‘tsunami’ of AI attacks
Cybersecurity boss shores up defences for ‘tsunami’ of AI attacks
Publish Date: 2026-05-06 02:00:00
Source Domain: www.thetimes.com
Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points.
As a James Bond fan, Ian Brown is happy to show off the thumbprint technology that provides access to a security operations centre at Integrity360’s headquarters in Sandyford, south Dublin.
It is not exactly an explosive Parker pen but it is a cool piece of tech, which shows that security starts at home for the cybersecurity firm.
Inside the centre, the walls are covered in screens as Integrity360 employees search for the millions of threats that could compromise their clients. “We’re fighting the bad guys,” Brown says.
Set up by the entrepreneur Eoin Goulding in 2005, Integrity360 has become one of the top three pure-play cybersecurity specialists in Europe.
When Goulding sold a majority stake in the business in 2021 to Brown, his British private equity partner August Equity and the international investment bank Rothschild & Co, the growth of the business was put on turbocharge.
Goulding stepped down from leading the company to take up the position of non-executive director and pursue other interests. Brown became executive chairman and, under his watch, the company has gone from focusing purely on the Republic of Ireland to entering 15 other regions over the past five years, adopting a buy-and-build strategy.
“We’ve moved very quickly,” Brown says.
Since 2021, Integrity360 has bought ten companies of various sizes and ages — it does not disclose how much it pays, but three acquisitions in 2024 increased its revenues by €22 million, from €125 million to €157 million.
In 2024, it made its first acquisition outside Europe when it bought Grove Group, a South African company with 50 employees.
Since 2021, Integrity360 has bought ten companies of various sizes and agesBRYAN MEADE FOR THE TIMES
“In January, we planted our first flag on the American continent,” says Brown, referring to the acquisition of Advantus360, a cybersecurity services company operating out of Calgary in Canada.
Revenues have grown exponentially — from €37 million in 2021 to an expected €220 million this year — pretty much achieving the target it set for itself in 2021.
Now Brown has a new goal in mind. He would love the company to reach €1 billion in revenues. “It’s a realistic goal,” he says.“Over the past five years our revenues have gone up by over six times. We certainly have the opportunity to do that again. The Americas is a big opportunity for us.
“You could certainly see how in the next five years we could get up to €750 million. If we start buying bigger companies, which is something that we’re having discussions about around the boardroom table, then we can get there faster,” he adds.
Integrity360 provides what Brown calls “end-to-end cyber services”. It does everything from managing a company’s firewall and data security to handling emergency incident responses.
Brown says the business is proactive in how it defends clients. “We don’t wait for events to happen; we are constantly looking [for threats],” he says.
The company also provides testing services for clients where it pretends to be “the bad guys”.
“These are the projects that a lot of the team enjoy. We will do a full-on assault. We won’t tell our client when we are coming or how we’re coming [but will have the mandate to do it], and we’ll see how far we can get,” he says.
The company also takes its services offline to test the physical security of its customers’ offices “because that, in some respects, is equally as important as the digital security”, Brown says.
Undercover Integrity360 employees will see whether they can breach security by walking into office buildings and may even go as far as putting ransomware on a computer.
“It’s amazing with the morning rush how people tailgate and get into offices,” Brown says.
The company has dropped a bunch of USBs in a carpark to see whether an employee will pick them up and put them into a computer. “You’d be surprised at how many people do pick them up.”
Integrity360 has more than 3,500 clients, the majority of which are “mid-market and enterprise businesses, household names that you would be familiar with”, according to Brown.
He does not name names — cybersecurity is a notoriously secretive business. However, AIB has named the company as a supplier. Integrity360 has also won a number of public sector tenders, including for the Department of Foreign Affairs, Tallaght University Hospital and EirGrid.
In 2024, it won a €6 million, three-year contract to provide security services for the Central Bank of Ireland.
Brown says Integrity360 has seen an uptick in interest from small firms for cybersecurity services, as increasing numbers are feeling the pain of cyberattacks.
A survey carried out last year by the insurance broker Gallagher found that almost 90 per cent of Irish companies had experienced financial loss and commercial disruption because of a cyberattack between 2020 and 2025.
“The problem for [small companies] is if they get attacked, compromised and their systems are shut down, very often they don’t have the cash reserves and the balance sheet to survive it,” Brown says.
Artificial intelligence is throwing up further challenges and opportunities for Integrity360. Brown describes it as a “tsunami that’s coming”.
There are “new vulnerabilities for bad guys to exploit” and it “inevitably can present new types of attack vectors” but the company is “fighting AI attacks with AI”, he says.
In some tech companies, AI is attacking the employee headcount, but Brown says Integrity360 will continue to recruit. It has 800 staff, 100 of whom are based in Dublin, and the majority are “technical folk — experts, analysts and architects”. He adds: “There’s still a shortage of talent in this sector.”
Brown himself has a background in electronic engineering. From southern England, he spent much of his youth riding horses and harboured dreams of becoming a jockey.
“My family wasn’t wealthy enough to own a farm but I was always working on a farm,” he says. “In my final year of school, I worked as a trainee jockey over the sticks [hurdles] because I was too heavy to do flat.”
However, Brown soon came to the realisation that “you have to be in the top 1 per cent to earn any money as a jockey”.
He was quite ambitious and after a weekend helping at his father’s employer, Thorn EMI, a big British electrical engineering company, to move offices, he realised he had a better chance of earning good money in electronic engineering.
“I saw all this electronic instrumentation — there were oscilloscopes and spectrum analysers and all these things — and I got quite fascinated,” he says.
In the early 1980s, Brown was sponsored by Hewlett-Packard to study for a diploma in electronic engineering. He spent a lot of time in California and even met its co-founder, Dave Packard.
After Hewlett-Packard, he moved to 3Com, another American technology business. Despite “jumping up the corporate ladder” at 3Com, Brown says he always had a passion to do something by himself.
In 1995, he convinced Lloyds Bank to lend him $400,000 and 3i, a private equity group, to stump up £1.8 million to allow him to buy two small businesses and merge them together to create Fastnet, a communications and network services company.
“I remember being in the most dreadful office in Shoreditch [in east London], which used to flood,” Brown says — but Fastnet’s success was pretty rapid.
Within five years it was sold to Redstone, a London Stock Exchange-listed company. The private equity group 3i received a tenfold return on its £1.8 million investment and the sale made Brown a rich man.
A year later Redstone was struggling and its main institutional shareholders approached Brown about becoming chief executive. Brown called in an insolvency practitioner initially but, instead of winding up the firm, he drew up a rescue plan, raised £24 million and took an axe to costs, laying off staff. “I had to be a little bit brutal,” he says.
Over the next four years he reversed Redstone’s financial performance, got it back into the black and the business was growing when he departed in 2005. Redstone went through a demerger in 2013.
Two years later he co-founded Axell Wireless after merging three companies. It supplied an antenna system that enabled mobile phone coverage underground. It supplied systems for some of the world’s most well-known buildings, including the Pentagon in the US, Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the Bundestag in Germany. In 2013, Brown and his backers sold the company for £85 million.
The PentagonGETTY IMAGES
He first joined forces with August Equity in 2015, when both parties invested in SecureData Europe, a cybersecurity firm based in England. Brown took up a leadership role in the business in 2016, implementing a restructuring plan.
In 2019, the French communications firm Orange bought the company in a deal said to be valued at £120 million. It was another good payday for Brown and August, with a 7.5 times return on their investment.
“I will always write a cheque when investing in the company,” he says. “I don’t put as much money in as the private equity investor does but I still put quite a lot of money in — and they like that because it means I’ve got skin in the game.”
With Integrity360, he and August seem on track to replicate previous successes. Brown says he has developed a good working relationship with the London-based private equity firm — which has also invested in OneTouch, the Galway company.
“We know each other very well,” he says. “We don’t always agree, we’ll bicker sometimes, but we always do it in a closed room and have never fallen out.”
Brown says an exit from Integrity360 is not imminent. “At some point there will be a change in ownership but that doesn’t have to be as dramatic as it sounds,” he says. “It might be that August sells down part of their stake or brings in an additional investor. I get a lot of calls from people, other funds, saying, ‘Can we invest in Integrity360?’”
Brown says he would be disappointed if the company did not buy another two businesses this year. “I’ve learnt through doing this game for 30-odd years that nothing’s over until it’s over, until a bit of paper is signed.”
The company will focus on growing its business in America and the Middle East once the war “settles down a bit”.
Brown, now 62, has no intention of doing a Daniel Craig and stepping away from the leading man role. “We set out to build Integrity360 as a global business. We’re only covering 25 per cent of the world, so there’s a long way to go.”
The life of Ian Brown
Age: 62Lives: Ballsbridge, DublinFamily: partner Katrina, and four adult childrenEducation: higher national diploma in electronic engineering from Favourite film: Spectre, the 2015 James Bond filmFavourite book: Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson. “I am currently reading The Art of Power by Nancy Pelosi.”
Ian Brown’s favourite film is Spectre, starring Daniel Craig as 007Alamy
Working day: For me exercise is a significant thing so I get up at about 6am every day and go to the gym. I travel about 50 per cent of the time. We’re a company where I think visible leadership is important, so I spend a lot of time going to the offices, seeing the teams, having sessions with the managers, meeting some of the customers or some of the suppliers. On the days I am in the office in Dublin, I’ll spend a lot of time on video calls and tend to stay until 8pm.
Downtime: I was a competitive triathlete but don’t do that any more. I love being on a boat. I charter yachts with friends and travel around Corsica or the Italian coast. I enjoy socialising.
