Managed IT and security for oil, gas, and minerals
Keep Wire Fraud and Data Leaks Out of Your Next Multi-Million Dollar Energy Deal
Our work is on the office side of oil and gas. We secure your capital calls, keep your land research out of other people's hands, and give institutional investors reason to stay comfortable. You get on with closing deals.
A 30-minute call. Describe how one of your closings runs and we will mark where someone could step into it.
Fifteen people, seven-figure wires
That is a common shape for a mineral buyer, a lease broker, or an acquisition group: a staff you could seat at one table, closing seven-figure deals month after month. It is also the shape criminals look for. Four problems come up more than any others.
- Closing funds sent to the wrong account. Someone gets into a deal thread and reads quietly for weeks. Then new wiring instructions arrive, looking as if they came from the seller, the title attorney, or your own accounting department.
- Sellers, heirs, and partners who are not who they claim. An address one character off from the real one, posing as a seller, an heir, or one of your landmen, requests a payment or a set of documents. Nothing about the message looks unusual.
- Buy areas and offers that get out. Your target tracts, price per acre, and owner lists live in mailboxes and shared drives. If a competitor sees them, they can beat your number before your offer letters are delivered.
- Owner records left in the open. Laptops and inboxes hold W-9s, Social Security numbers, bank details, and heirship documents for hundreds of owners. State breach laws apply to each of those records.
Security that does not cost you the closing date
Making a closing safe should not mean making it late. Defendrs serves as the IT and security department for land and mineral companies. In practice that means three things: the mailboxes where your deals get negotiated are protected, every outgoing payment passes a verification step first, and access to deal files is limited to the people who should have it.
Nothing about how your landmen, analysts, and partners work day to day has to change. What changes is that someone is now paying attention to the accounts and files behind them.
What we protect
1. The money: payments and closings
Mailboxes. Defenses against business email compromise, including fraudulent payment instructions, backed by 24/7 monitoring that raises a flag on suspicious access, forwarding rules, and lookalike domains. Cloud tenants. MFA, access assigned by role, controls on file sharing, and monitoring for sign-ins from places you would not expect.
2. The edge: deal and title data
Deal folders. Purchase agreements, title runsheets, ownership reports, and maps live where access depends on role, and that access comes off when the project closes out. Devices for staff and contract landmen. Any laptop or phone carrying deal files is encrypted and kept patched, and it can be wiped if it is lost.
3. The relationships: owners and investors
Your domain. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured properly, so offer letters and payment notices arrive in owners’ inboxes and no one else can send mail under your name. Your capital partners. Written policies and evidence that the safeguards work, ready for investor due diligence, lender questionnaires, and cyber insurance applications.
Signs a land or mineral company is exposed
Someone who rolled off a project last year can still get into its shared folder or data room.
A closing’s wiring instructions arrive by email and get paid without a confirming phone call.
Inboxes and desktop folders hold owner W-9s and bank details.
Your offer letters and owner emails bounce or go to spam, and nobody has figured out the cause.
Contract landmen and brokers store deal files on their own laptops, which the company has never laid eyes on.
A lender, investor, or insurer sent security questions and you had no good answers.
Common questions
How do you stop closing funds from being diverted?
Payment fraud nearly always starts in a mailbox, so that is where we start. Every mailbox gets MFA and monitoring. We alert on the forwarding rules and lookalike domains criminals put in place ahead of time. Then there is the rule we help you adopt and hold to: a new or changed wiring instruction does not get paid until someone confirms it by phone, using a number you already had on file. No software catches every attempt. The phone call counts for as much as the tools do.
Is any of this going to hold up a closing?
It should not. Monitoring, patching, and backups all happen in the background. What your team will see is MFA when they sign in and a confirmation call before a wire goes out, each of which takes a minute or two. Bigger changes get scheduled for the gaps between closings.
Most of our landmen and brokers are independent contractors. Can you cover people who are not on payroll?
Yes. We give contractors a protected route to your files, such as a managed company account or a secured device. Deal data stays inside your systems and stays off their personal laptops. Their access ends the same day their contract does.
Our buy areas, offers, and owner lists are spread across shared folders and data rooms. How do they stay private?
Access is granted per project and per role, and opening a deal folder requires MFA. When a person leaves or a project wraps up, the access is removed. We also go back through the outside parties who still have a live link and check whether they should.
A lender or investor sent a security questionnaire. Can you help us complete it?
Yes. We implement the safeguards you are missing and write policies that reflect what you really do. Then we help you fill in the form with evidence to support each answer. That same package works for your cyber insurance application.
We keep W-9s and bank details for hundreds of mineral owners. What if those get exposed?
State breach-notification laws treat owner tax and banking records as personal information. Lose them and you may have to notify every owner affected. We narrow down where those records are kept, encrypt the devices holding them, and retain the logs that show what was opened and what was not. For the exact requirements in the states where you operate, check with your attorney.
Secure the next closing while it is still a lead.
Explain how a deal moves through your shop. Within 30 minutes we will point to the first place a criminal would try, and to what needs fixing before another wire leaves your account.