In addition to joint protection against Business Email Compromise and Email Account Compromise, Proofpoint is announcing some technology enhancements to their CASB offering.
Ryan Kalember, Proofpoint’s executive vice president of Cybersecurity Strategy
Cybersecurity vendor Proofpoint has made a pair of announcements. The first is the availability of broader security bundles to provide integrated, end-to-end protection against both BEC [Business Email Compromise] and EAC [Email Account Compromise] attacks. They also announced innovations to their Proofpoint Cloud App Security Broker [CASB] solution.
“There are a couple of new CASB innovations, but more broadly, what we are announcing is an easier way for an organization to protect itself against broad attacks from both BEC and EAC attacks,” said Ryan Kalember, Proofpoint’s executive vice president of Cybersecurity Strategy. “These interrelated sets of attacks have made BEC and EAC the most expensive things in cybersecurity.”
BEC and EAC attacks have cost companies over $26 billion worldwide, and are responsible for more cyber insurance claims than any other threat, including ransomware. Kalember emphasized that fully integrated protection is particularly important against these attacks because cybercriminal attacks take so many different forms, which are basically interconnected in their approach across cloud and email channels.
“They had success in spoofing domains, and in response to defenses against that, they moved to Office 365 with email compromised attacks, which in turn led to internal phishing attacks,” he said. “All of these also became reconnaissance for bigger attacks.”
Kalember said Proofpoint has responded to this with a couple of different strategies.
“We tried to increase the resilience of users with training and technical solutions, and the part that may matter most, is that we decided to make it easier to build a set of tools against all the tactics, to take them all away in one fell swoop. What made it hard to do in the past was not making it easy to do it by selling our broad range of technical and training solutions separately”
The result is broader end-to-end solutions that address both BEC and EAC attacks by combining Proofpoint’s secure email gateway, advanced threat protection, threat response, email authentication, security awareness training, and cloud account protection.
“No one else can put together that collection of assets,” Kalember said. “We are the only one with all of the right pieces. We have had smaller bundles before, but these difference solutions were not always bought together. This is one integrated SKU – a full solution to the problem.”
Kalember said that this will be offered to customers who are renewing an existing solution, which will be advantageous to them in most cases.
“More new customers tend to enter with bundles,” he indicated. “We try to make sure no one comes in with just one product, with the exception in some cases of the security awareness training.”
In addition, Proofpoint also announced multiple innovations to their Cloud App Security Broker (CASB).
“We have made an improvement to how we do risk-based authentication,” Kalember noted. “For example in long sessions, the degree of risk might change, so that we would possibly prompt them to authentication again or with multi-factor authentication, especially around email account compromise.”
The other innovation involves better protection around third-party applications.
“Organizations have had to tolerate use of third-party applications which weren’t really theirs,” Kalember said. “What we can do is let them isolate these browser sessions in a container in the cloud, where no sensitive data goes up, and no malware comes down.”
Kalember said that the joint BEC and EAC protection will be a valuable new tool for channel partners.
“They look to be their customer’s trusted advisor, the neutral third party who can help the customer with their problems,” he stated. “BEC and EAC right now are such a huge problem. Losses are massive. Customers really do want to talk about how to solve this problem, It’s exciting to be able to point to a way of solving it with a combination of technical innovations and packaging that makes it easier to consume.”
