Announcing ICES, Your Integrated Cloud Email Security Platform

Advanced email attacks that use social engineering are more prevalent than ever, accounting for nearly half of all cybercrime losses in 2020. Unfortunately, secure email gateways are unable to stop them, as they do not contain traditional indicators of compromise like malicious attachments or suspicious links, and they are launched from known domains.

Because these attacks prey on human emotions, often containing urgent language from high-profile executives or known vendors, they are highly effective at tricking people into sending money, paying fake invoices, or providing access to sensitive information. Abnormal was built to stop these attacks, and we’ve been highly successful since we launched our platform nearly two years ago. We now protect enterprises worldwide, including 100% of employees at 5% of the Fortune 1000.

That said, there was more work to be done, as we searched for better ways to protect our customers from the types of attacks that lead to severe financial losses and reputational damage. We’ve been working on something big, and I am delighted to share with you our next major release—the Abnormal Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) platform.

We’ve significantly advanced our capabilities with today’s introduction. Abnormal ICES offers all-in-one email security, delivering a precise approach to combat the full spectrum of email-borne threats. Powered by behavioral AI technology and deeply integrated with Microsoft 365 (and soon, Google Workspace), Abnormal ICES allows you to simplify your email security architecture, expand your protection, improve employee productivity, and streamline operations and reporting.

Our latest product innovation offers unique value to our customers while protecting you from the full spectrum of email-based threats.

Organizations that want comprehensive inbound email protection are often stuck with multiple products, incompatible architectures, unnecessary expenses, and management overhead. They often disable Microsoft 365’s native protection to avoid any conflict between spam management, to prevent sender authentication failure, and to avoid juggling multiple dashboards.

This architecture does little to protect them from the most nefarious email attacks, including external and lateral phishing, employee and VIP impersonation, invoice and payment fraud, vendor email compromise, cloud account takeover, and other socially-engineered attacks. According to the FBI, 44% of all cybercrime losses in 2020 were due to business email compromise, and this number continues to grow year-over-year.

Now, organizations can simplify their stack by eliminating the redundant email gateway layer, and re-enabling and enhancing Microsoft’s cloud gateway capabilities. Abnormal ICES will unify your entire inbound email security defenses, from email hygiene to zero-day advanced attacks.

Our customers have recognized Abnormal for its superior ability to block the full spectrum of email attacks. By applying the same behavioral, data science-based approach to spam and graymail we are able to increase your end-users’ productivity by providing the highest efficacy detection and keeping their inboxes free of unwanted email. Further, our API-driven approach allows us to tailor this detection on a per-user basis enabling us to understand what types of messages are relevant to your end-users, and what is not.

ICES also delivers a new approach for detecting malware attacks using behavioral analysis, and improves detection of targeted phishing and social engineering attacks. Abnormal ICES is the only cloud-native solution to defend against all email attacks, including external and lateral phishing, employee and VIP impersonation, invoice and payment fraud, vendor email compromise, cloud account takeover, malware and ransomware, spam, and graymail.

Abnormal ICES puts an end to spam digests and portals, bringing in a fresh, new consumer-grade experience to corporate email. End users no longer have to leave Outlook or their mobile mail client. The ICES platform learns each end user’s preference as they move emails between inbox, spam, and promotional folders, and automatically creates and manages individualized safe and blocklists. This enables ICES to deliver incoming emails directly into their appropriate folders.

And that’s not all. We know that not all emails and URLs are malicious. Yet secure email gateways rewrite every URL because of their inability to detect some of these advanced attacks at time of delivery. ICES only rewrites suspicious URLs within emails that look like borderline attacks. With this selective approach to URL rewriting, security teams will find that end users will no longer need to whitelist URLs or complain about getting stuck on a web page that blocked access to a legitimate site. Plus, security teams can focus on reviewing interactions with only those URLs that are deemed suspicious.

With these new capabilities, ICES dramatically improves end user experience and productivity.

You will no longer need to juggle between dashboards to gather email security insights and reports to better understand your overall email security posture. A consolidated, single-pane-of-glass dashboard across both Microsoft and Abnormal provides a 360-degree view of the entire email stream.

ICES centralizes insights, and actions—from edge protection, spam, and malware right down to user-reported email attacks—and the management of global blocklists, across hundreds of tenants, for both Microsoft and Google environments, upon a single pane of glass.

Abnormal ICES is the only cloud-native solution to defend against all email attacks, including external and lateral phishing, employee and VIP impersonation, invoice and payment fraud, vendor email compromise, cloud account takeover, malware and ransomware, and spam and graymail.

We’re thrilled to launch the product, and we can’t wait to see what you think.

Interested in learning more about the new Abnormal ICES platform? Request a demo today.