ESG Technical Validation of Abnormal Security: Key Takeaways

When it comes to selecting the right cybersecurity solution for your organization, there are several factors to consider, but first and foremost—does the technology really work? It’s easy for companies to boast the quality of their software, but that holds very little value to security leaders who are trying to decide between a dozen different providers. So, instead of us talking about Abnormal’s capabilities, we’ll let you take a look at a third-party validation proving that our solution does what we say it does.

The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Technical Validation of Abnormal is a commissioned analyst report distributed under license from TechTarget, Inc. ESG evaluated the Abnormal Cloud Email Security platform to examine how Abnormal Behavior Technology (ABX) can protect organizations from socially engineered attacks that bypass traditional email security solutions. ESG focused specifically on Abnormal’s API integration, behavioral AI capabilities, and VendorBase to determine efficacy.

Here are a few key takeaways from this report.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research has found that the high resource cost of remediation is one of the most common impacts of security incidents cited by organizations. Adding to the burden of an already overworked security team will not lead to optimal results. ESG validated Abnormal's API integration's ease of use and speed. A couple of clicks and an OAuth authorization is all that is needed to get started.

While this saves time and effort, since administrators don’t need to configure complicated rules and policies or make any changes to MX records (like they would with traditional security solutions), this isn’t the whole story. Once Abnormal is connected to the cloud email service, it has visibility to correlate user identity and behavior indicators with signals in email content and east-west traffic communication.

In practice, Abnormal is detecting missed attacks within hours of deployment—without requiring security professionals to manage the platform after integration.

In today's world, social engineering over email is prevalent, and it is effective. Eloquent emails sent from a trusted email address can be malicious and incredibly difficult to detect by both tools and end users. ESG observed how Abnormal’s advanced machine learning algorithms analyzed several factors that may be overlooked and used them to determine abnormal email activity.

Abnormal can find and remediate difficult-to-detect email attacks that may otherwise look legitimate and evade traditional detection methods. These emails are less frequent but can be the costliest for organizations. Detecting these gives companies incredible value and ensures that their users do not have to make decisions on the legitimacy of each email.

Email attacks are dangerous due to their unpredictable nature. With early threat detection, companies can anticipate and prepare for future attacks to avoid devastating losses. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reviewed the VendorBase maintained by Abnormal. This federated database contains data collected from all Abnormal customers and helps to determine the relative risk of each vendor—especially useful as threat actors are increasingly using vendor relationships to initiate attacks.

Using advanced risk data, companies can be alerted to compromised vendor emails and inform their vendors about potential risks. In turn, when suspicious emails are detected by Abnormal for one customer, that vendor risk score is updated across all customers to help others within the Abnormal community.

In recent years, social engineering through email has become one of the most dangerous attack vectors. Socially engineered emails impersonate legitimate vendors or members of the executive team in order to steal credentials, data, or money. And because they rarely contain traditional indicators of compromise, they can be incredibly difficult to detect.

ESG’s validation of Abnormal Cloud Email Security demonstrates its efficacy and value in protecting end-users from business email compromise and other advanced email attacks. View and download the full report here to discover why ESG believes that you should consider the risk reduction capabilities of Abnormal Cloud Email Security.

Interested in learning more about how Abnormal can protect your organization? Schedule a demo below.