In recent years, more emphasis is put on privacy concerns and data security while online. The shields at the forefront of this battle for privacy and secure internet access are VPNs and proxies, and more notably residential IP proxies. While claiming to offer anonymization to users, residential proxies also account for some security issues.

**Residential IP proxies** are used for ads, shopping, and social networks, but a number of them are used for malicious purposes. Cyber criminals and bot developers are anonymizing their traffic using residential IP proxies, whose small footprint makes them harder to detect.

Spur Intelligence started as an industry exposé of VPNs, residential proxies, malware proxies and other anonymization behaviour, and their role in cybercrime and fraud. Thomas Kilmer and his co-founder Ethan Smith started Spur in 2017 and today they are a multi-purpose IP context provider.

To aid in understanding the role anonymization infrastructure plays in the cybercrime realm, we chatted with Tom Kilmer. We met (virtually) with Tom in Orlando, and heard his backstory, how he discovered the need for a service like Spur, and how they have been positioning themselves as an "anti-TI" vendor in the IP reputation space.

**Securitytrails: Tom, you finished a BS in Computer Science in Texas and after that, had some experiences in the public sector before joining Team Cymru and later Redacted. Can you tell us more about that time?**

**Thomas Kilmer:** After graduating college in 2011, I went to work for the Department of Defense in Maryland. I consider the nearly 3 years I spent in the public sector a continuation of my education. I also met the co-founder of Spur, Ethan Smith, during that time.

Although I enjoyed my time with the government, I also wanted to experience the private sector. At the recommendation of a mentor, I moved with my wife to Florida in 2014 and joined Team Cymru. Cymru was different from my government experience and it provided me with a wealth of knowledge and experiences that would prove invaluable nearly 3 years later at Spur.

In late 2016, my buddies from my time in the government called to let me know they were joining up with some folks from Silicon Valley to tackle problems facing the private sector. It sounded very exciting as I knew being part of a start-up would provide the necessary experiences to eventually start my own company.

I met back up with Ethan and others at Redacted. We were responsible for building a lot of the backend infrastructure in-between stress tests and trying to automate as much of the process as possible. We were exposed to a lot of 3rd party data, threat intelligence products and platforms, which gave us incredible insight into the state of security at a lot of high profile companies. However, our roles were not lending themselves to growth outside of a technical one. With that thought, we decided to take the leap and created Spur.

**How did you leverage your past experiences in making the jump from the private sector to becoming an entrepreneur and running your own company?**

**Tom:** I had no idea what I was doing. I had a lot of experience interfacing with customers, performing data acquisition, and building technical solutions. At both Cymru and Redacted I would often think to myself how easy the non-engineering teams had it. The more I talk with technical folks, I realize it is a very common sentiment. But I was wrong. Bizdev is hard. Sales is hard. General business management and keeping up with filings is tedious.

We took a very alternative approach to starting Spur. We wanted to be employee owned and not raise outside funding. Our mentors all told us it was a doable but much slower process and that we would have to be very careful. We sought out contract work from the connections we made throughout our careers. We knew it would be a split of time between contracts and our own work, but we'd ultimately build a product that would be ours...