Security Feature

According to the Radicati Group, the number of emails sent per day in 2015 was around 205 billion. This works out to 2.4 million every second and 74 trillion in a single year. They go on to say that around 90 percent are spam and viruses, which highlights the challenges of protecting users from malicious emails.  In short, as a vector of vulnerability it does not get any bigger than email.  It is why the announcement from Agari, a cyber security company specializing in protecting enterprises from advanced email phishing attacks, of the general availability of the Agari Enterprise Protect solution is noteworthy.

The company is promoting the Agari Enterprise Protect solution as, "The industry's only email security solution that stops sophisticated, difficult to detect spear phishing attacks that are evading current security tools."

For those not familiar, spear phishing is email that looks as if it is sent from someone you know be it from an individual or organization.  In actuality, it is from criminals looking to get information from your computing device. The information they are after varies depending on the target. However, it could be anything from industry secrets in corporate network information to credit card or bank account numbers of individual consumers. 

The exploits, as noted,  are generally achieved by impersonating someone you know and trust. The new Agari solution is able to identify and isolate these types of attacks by building behavioral trust models based on the identity of the email sender. It can then protect enterprises from email-based data breaches, financial theft, malware delivery, credential theft and critical system failures.

"With the adoption of Agari Enterprise Protect, we are enhancing our employees' overall trust level in their email, taking the safety and security of our members, clients and employees to the next level," said Jim Routh, CSO, Aetna.

The process of identifying malicious emails is made possible with the Agari data science discovery, which points out sending a legitimate email has a domain identity with unique behavioral patterns. Using the company's Email Trust Platform, it is able to provide unparalleled visibility into more than 10 billion email messages per day across three billion mailboxes.

The machine learning, and its patent-pending analytics engine, along with the company’s email telemetry network delivers insights which gives the Agari Enterprise Protect solution the ability to create trust models with the behavioral pattern of all legitimate domains. Organizations can now identify, isolate and stop attacks so their employees only get and interact with email messages they can trust.

The type of phishing attacks that are now being carried out are sophisticated and hard to detect. Patrick Peterson, founder and CEO of Agari, puts it more succinctly, "The most malicious email attacks are no longer pleas for funds from a purported Nigerian Prince. Instead, the cybercriminals of today are sophisticated shape shifters who take the form of your most trusted colleagues -- your CEO, CFO or long-time business partner."

He goes on to say, "Agari Enterprise Protect delivers what traditional security solutions cannot -- it successfully identifies and halts targeted email attacks, even those which do not include a malicious payload, thereby enabling enterprises to preserve trust within their organization and maintain their competitive edge."