Abnormal Blog

Meeting invites are one of the most common types of emails sent today, so it should come as no surprise that attackers have found a way to manipulate them. Scores of recipients that utilize Abnormal Security recently received emails that contained a .ics attachment—an invitation file commonly used to populate online calendar applications with meeting and event information.

At a hyper-growth startup, a solution from six months ago will unfortunately no longer scale. The business is growing rapidly, and this traffic to this service in particular was growing at an unprecedented rate. We hit a point where it needed re-architecting to support 10x the current scale.

Learn about Abnormal’s enhanced SIEM export schema, which provides centralized visibility into email threats

The phishing email is one of the oldest and most successful types of cyberattacks. Attackers have long used phishing as a common attack vector to steal sensitive information or credentials from their victims. While most phishing emails are relatively simple to spot, the number of successful attacks has grown in recent years.

For those of you who have visited the Abnormal website over the last month, you’ve seen something different—a redesigned brand focused on precision. It’s new and innovative, and different from any other cybersecurity company, because it was created with one thing in mind: our customers.

At Abnormal, our customers have always been our biggest priority. Customer obsession is one of our five company values, and we live this every single day as we provide the best email security protection available for the hundreds of companies who entrust us to protect their mailboxes.

Before we jump into modern threats, I think it’s important to set the stage ​​since email has been around. Since email existed, threat actors targeted email users with malicious messages, general spam, and different ways to take advantage of the platform. Then of course, more dangerous attacks started to come up… things like malware and other viruses.

While cybersecurity awareness is a year-round venture, it is especially important to be mindful during certain times of the year. With Thanksgiving here in the United States on Thursday, our thoughts will likely be on our family and friends and everything we have to be thankful for this holiday season.

Our newest platform capabilities help customers streamline critical security workflows, like triaging phishing mailbox submissions or triggering tickets to investigate account takeovers, through automated playbooks. Doing so can decrease mean time to respond (MTTR) to incidents, further reducing any potential risk to the organization and eliminating manual workflows to save time and increase the efficiency of IT and security teams.

On November 9, 2021, we identified an unusual phishing email that claimed to be from “Immigration Visa and Travel,” inviting the recipient to renew their membership in the TSA PreCheck program. The email wasn’t sent from a .gov domain, but the average consumer might not immediately reject it as a scam, particularly because it had the term “immigrationvisaforms” in the domain. The email instructed the user to renew their membership at another quasi-legitimate-looking website.

At Abnormal Security, we use a data science-based approach to keep our customers safe from the most advanced email attacks. This requires processing huge amounts of data to train machine learning models, build datasets, and otherwise model the typical behavior of the organizations we’re protecting.

As major social media platforms have expanded the ability of creators to monetize their content in the last few years, they and their users have increasingly found themselves the targets of malicious activity. TikTok is now no exception.

One of the key objectives of the Abnormal platform is to provide the highest precision detection to block all never-before-seen attacks. This ranges from socially-engineered attacks to account takeovers to everyday spam, and the platform does it without customers needing to create countless rules like with traditional secure email gateways.

Tony Dong, Director of Engineering at Rippling, is no stranger to the diverse set of engineering problems that fast-growing startups create. Before building and leading his teams at Rippling, Tony was CTO and co-founder at PerShop, a YC backed startup, and Senior Engineer at Twitter, Periscope, and TellApart.

Abnormal is focused on our customers, which is why we’re continually updating our product based on customer feedback. Our newest platform capabilities help customers maximize existing security investments with several integrations that will allow security operation centers (SOCs) to better respond to security events and align with internal workflows.

As Abnormal grows, we have to maintain a scalable codebase across all areas of engineering to prevent issues around testing, maintainability, and documentation. When organizations scale, a common problem is that the codebase becomes cluttered, with multiple teams writing different code that accomplishes the same task.

As we close the books on another Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it’s clear that cybersecurity should be a priority all twelve months—not just one. To do so, security teams should emphasize practical tools (the what) and techniques (the how) to keep the company and employees safe.

One of our key objectives at Abnormal is to provide the highest precision detection to block all never-before-seen attacks. We stop a wide range of threats, encompassing everything from social engineering attacks and business email compromise to everyday spam, and we do it without requiring customers to create countless rules, as is the case with traditional secure email gateways.

Nearly six months ago, I joined Abnormal as a Product Designer, doubling the size of our Product Design team from one to two. In this time, we've shipped products that protect people against email threats, updated our design system, launched a new brand, and improved many processes. It’s been an exciting time to be at Abnormal, and the experience has made me a better designer.

What is unique to this campaign is that these messages contained QR codes offering access to a missed voicemail, handily avoiding the URL scan feature for email attachments present in secure email gateways and native security controls

With Detection 360, submission to threat containment just got 94% faster, making it incredibly easy for customers to submit false positives or missed attacks, and get real-time updates from Abnormal on investigation, conclusion, and remediation.

Unfortunately, physically threatening extortion attempts sent via email continue to impact companies and public institutions when received—disrupting business, intimidating employees, and occasioning costly responses from public safety.

Cybersecurity Careers Awareness Week is a great opportunity to explore key careers in information security, particularly as there are an estimated 3.1 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs. This disparity means that cybercriminals are taking advantage of the situation, sending more targeted attacks and seeing greater success each year.

As with every equation, there are always two sides and while it can be easy to blame users when they fall victim to scams and attacks, we also need to examine how we build and staff security teams.