ADT Helps Protect Workforce with Comprehensive Email Defense

Safe, smart, and sustainable is what ADT is. As the most trusted brand in smart home security, ADT’s security, automation, and monitoring technology help protect and connect more than 6 million residential, small business, and commercial customers. To run its business successfully, ADT must also protect its employees from advanced email attacks.

ADT’s mission is to be in front of the email vector to help mitigate that threat for the organization that could include compromised vendors and third parties. The top challenges faced by ADT were:

• Vast supply chain created many opportunities for vendor email compromise attacks

• Volume of attacks made it difficult for IT to identify trends and areas for security improvement.

• Security team time spent on manual threat review and remediation, which meant less time for proactive security.

“Today’s threat landscape is dynamic,” said ADT CISO Ryan Fritts. “You can have order fraud, invoice fraud, business email compromise, and it can be very difficult to understand that dynamic.”

ADT moved to Microsoft 365 seven years ago, and it allowed for a lot better deployment of technologies on top of Microsoft 365 interoperability. With Abnormal, ADT has an advanced security solution that is easily integrated with Microsoft 365. Quick deployment via API allowed ADT to integrate Abnormal and see results in less than an hour,

“The reason to bring in Abnormal was twofold, efficacy and ease of deployment. Realization of value was almost equally as immediate. You gain real-time visibility into the attacks and attack scenarios that are still going on in the environment, and that are fundamentally still getting through the traditional defenses.” Ryan Fritts, CISO ADT.

He added, “The reality of having Abnormal and Microsoft, it provides clarity on the attacks, and the context to the users on the attacks allows us to respond more quickly and more efficiently. We've seen a significant drop in the number of business email compromise, invoice order fraud, and other types of email-originated fraud traffic that ultimately ends up being interacted with at all by a user.

Abnormal has helped us better protect our organization because it's in front of the flood of email-originated threats.”

“Today's threat landscape is very dynamic, changing. You'd stay ahead of the game by leaning in on technology to help with the fight. Modern technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning can really understand the dynamic of what's normal and what's not.” Ryan Fritts, CISO ADT.

Before Abnormal, ADT would have to go in and review events and incidents and apply their own evaluation of the scenario to evaluate whether an email is legitimate or not. With Abnormal, ADT can rely upon Abnormal's API to categorize and understand the threat more discreetly. ADT is able to look at the trends and the consistencies between attacks and be more proactive about how they train their employees and engage in social engineering awareness.

• Zero successful attacks during the past 24 months since deploying Abnormal.

• Hundreds of compromised vendor email accounts identified

• Dramatic reduction in business email compromise and invoice fraud attacks

• More time for the security team to develop security awareness training based on trends visible in the Abnormal dashboard

“The realization of value was almost immediate—real-time visibility into attacks going on in the environment that are bypassing the traditional defenses. That context allowed ADT to start identifying threat trends while blocking them from employee inboxes. Abnormal provides the ability for us to scale with confidence because we know that we’re going to get the same quality of protection at one person as at 28,000,” said Fritts, “Abnormal helps us to better protect our organization. We’ve seen a significant drop in BEC and order fraud, so now we have time to be more proactive on security.”