6 Reasons to Automate Your User-Reported Email Workflow
Organizations train employees to embrace cybersecurity best practices by not engaging with suspicious emails and reporting them to security teams. Once reported, analysts invest time and resources to manually investigate, remediate, and respond to those emails. The time and resource investment required to triage reported emails can bottleneck analysts from other important security hygiene-related tasks.
Abuse Mailbox Automation removes this bottleneck by providing an innovative alternative approach that completely automates the user-reported email workflow, resulting in an improved security posture. Customers of Abuse Mailbox Automation realize unique benefits from its automation; here are five examples.
1. Improved SOC Efficiency
A typical user-reported phishing email workflow without Abuse Mailbox Automation looks like this:
The user reports a suspicious email to the phishing mailbox.
- The SOC analyst investigates the email to determine if it is malicious or safe:
If deemed safe, they may inform the employee.
If deemed malicious, they will triage the environment to identify other malicious emails that reached other inboxes as part of the same campaign.
The SOC analyst remediates the email campaign and may alert the employee of the malicious nature of the reported email.
This process is manually intensive and relies heavily on an analyst’s ability to quickly identify and remediate reported malicious emails.
Abuse Mailbox Automation applies Abnormal’s AI-powered detection to the reported emails to automatically determine if the email is malicious, safe, or spam. If deemed malicious, Abnormal automates the remediation of the email, along with every other unreported email included in that phishing campaign within employee inboxes.
This automation results in measurably improved SOC efficiency and additional resources for other manually intensive investigations. In fact, the average Abuse Mailbox Automation customer realizes the following benefits:
80% reduction in time spent reviewing user-reported emails
4,900 SOC analyst hours saved annually
2 full-time employees freed from handling user-reported emails
2. Defense in Depth
When a user reports an email as phishing, Abuse Mailbox Automation triggers a reinvestigation of that email. The reinvestigation adds another layer of security by reviewing emails that bypassed the initial layer of protection.
3. Enhances Detection Efficacy
End users are commonly identified as an organization’s largest attack surface. Abuse Mailbox Automation can transform your end users from a liability, into a line of defense.
When a user-reported malicious email is remediated through Abuse Mailbox Automation, there is a feedback loop back to Abnormal’s AI-powered inbound protection. This feedback loop means that every confirmed malicious email reported by employees improves the organization’s detection efficacy against future email threats.
4. More Productivity
Spam and malicious emails can clog up employee email inboxes, reducing productivity as employees sift through graymail to find legitimate emails. Even with significant tuning and configuration, legacy email protection can struggle to filter out spam and malicious content. This results in more user-reported phishing emails and more work to triage those reports.
Abuse Mailbox Automation, combined with Inbound Email Security, drastically reduces the amount of spam finding its way to employee inboxes and automates the triage of user-reported phishing emails. This approach allows employees to reallocate time previously spent on determining what is and is not malicious in their inbox.
5. Healthier Cybersecurity Culture
An employee receives a suspicious email and remembers their security awareness training which encouraged them to report suspicious emails to their security team. What happens after the security team has reviewed the email? If the organization has a feedback loop an analyst will manually follow-up with every employee to let them know whether or not that email was in fact malicious. Without a feedback loop, employees may wonder whether or not they should have reported the email. They may be concerned that they created additional work for teammates who had to manually triage that report. Ultimately, they may be disincentivized to report additional suspicious emails.
Abuse Mailbox Automation provides customizable auto-response templates that automatically email the employee back with information on whether their reported email was deemed to be safe, malicious, or spam.
6. Integration with SIEM Solutions
Ingesting, analyzing, and responding to alerts at scale can be difficult for security teams. A SIEM tool allows security teams to collect, aggregate, and analyze data in a more automated and scalable way. Security products that don't integrate with an organization's SIEM tool necessitate an added manual triage process which demands more time and resources to manage that product. This puts additional strain on analysts who have to extract the data from another dashboard and aggregate it manually.
Abuse Mailbox Automation data is available within our SIEM integrations. This integration enhances security teams' ability to analyze user-reported email threats and send contextualized security intelligence to the SIEM, allowing for the creation of custom dashboards and incident response workflows.
Learn More
Abnormal’s Inbound Email Security product, combined with Abuse Mailbox Automation, can completely automate your user-reported email workflow. Interested in learning more? Schedule a demo today!
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