Three Ways Abnormal Streamlines Email Security and SOC Operations

Security teams are often under-resourced, asked to “do more with less” and even with the best threat detection tools in the world, there simply are not enough hours in the day—especially if those tools require manual investigation of surfaced threats or the need to correlate events across various platforms and consoles.

This is why, aside from being asked to solve email security problems in the inbox by our customers, we’re often asked how we can help streamline security operations—whether through automated remediation of email threats or integration across the security stack.

And with ESG citing that 28% of organizations consider consolidation of security controls (and 18% stating simplifying security administration) as their top priority, this is not an anecdotal concern.

Abnormal delivers a variety of solutions to help facilitate this shift—simplifying detection, enhancing investigation, and automating remediation.

Coming full circle, let’s talk about where “solving” business email compromise (BEC) meets the need for automation and consolidation. The two are inextricably linked as stopping more email threats is only possible if those threats can be detected faster and detected automatically.

Abnormal uses advanced AI—from large language models (LLM) to computer vision and more—to analyze every email message coming into your network. It detects not only the garden variety phishing attacks but the payloadless, insidious executive impersonation, vendor compromise, and other permutations of social engineering that are otherwise difficult to detect with legacy gateway solutions.

This is done immediately and without the need for manual intervention, saving security teams an average of 15+ hours per week—time normally spent detecting, investigating, and remediating email threats.

Each time a threat is detected, it’s added to the Threat Log in the Abnormal Portal where security analysts can see all of the different markers that indicated this email was malicious. Content and behavioral analysis, among other results, are showcased in simple terms, making esoteric security knowledge accessible to not only email security analysts but any other security or IT team that has access to the Portal.

Beyond threats to the inbox, Abnormal’s Account Takeover Protection solution uses behavioral analysis to flag unusual activity such as impossible travel, degraded browser versions, IP addresses, and more to identify potentially compromised user accounts. To further enhance detection of these accounts and optimize security investments, Abnormal integrates with Okta and Azure AD as well as having a two-way integration with Crowdstrike Falcon Identity—-utilizing unusual identity activity to enrich account takeover case files.

These case files are used to support comprehensive investigation of threats and suspicious activity—whether an internal account surfaced by Account Takeover Protection or a compromised vendor highlighted in Abnormal’s Vendorbase Knowledge Base. Vendorbase catalogs all vendors interacting with a given organization and attaches a risk score based on an analysis of recent email communications.

But what about scenarios outside of the upfront threat detection or user investigation? Often, security teams are assigned the Herculean task of maintaining what are often unwieldy user-reported phishing mailboxes. This process can take hours and yield an outsized amount of false positives or negatives if those security teams are unequipped to efficiently analyze each reported message.

Not only does Abnormal automate the analysis of each user-reported email with the Abuse Mailbox Automation solution, it automates the process of notifying the user, keeping them abreast of the investigation and whether that email was determined to be suspicious or not.

In this way, two operational efficiencies are unlocked: saving time without sacrificing precision for a critical task and keeping everyday users involved in threat investigation to build a strong culture of security. In fact, Abuse Mailbox Automation saves an average of 5,000 SOC hours annually and reduces time spent viewing user-reported emails by 95%.

Completing the triumvirate of security processes, how does Abnormal automate remediation? In multiple ways across multiple tools and disciplines.

All malicious emails are automatically sent to a hidden folder before a user has the opportunity to interact with them—-whether that email came from outside of the organization or was an internal message sent by a compromised email user.

Similarly, when there is high confidence that an account has been taken over, Abnormal immediately blocks access to the account, signs out of all active sessions, and forces a password reset, ensuring the malicious driver has been removed from the driver’s seat. This automated remediation has saved organizations an average of 1,454 hours normally spent addressing compromised accounts.

Threat data can then be shared with incident response and SIEM solutions such as Crowdstrike, Splunk, SumoLogic, and QRadar, providing additional value to the teams managing those tools through better threat contextualization. This helps to reduce notification noise and increase threat investigation efficacy at the SOC level.

As security leaders look to consolidate, and email security continues to evolve, the Abnormal Platform can help deliver on that consolidation while providing world-class email threat detection. But there is so much more to Abnormal, as we protect collaboration applications, help enhance security posture, and increase productivity with graymail remediation.

Interested in learning more? Schedule a demo today.