ALCIVIA Enhances Security and Productivity to Benefit Its Co-Op Members

ALCIVIA is built on the farming tradition of teamwork for a common goal. The cooperative provides farmers in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa with agronomy, animal nutrition, grain, financial, and energy products and services. ALCIVIA pursues member success through innovation, including technology.

In addition to serving more than 2,500 members of its own, ALCIVIA is part of the vast Land O’Lakes agricultural co-op system, which operates in every US state and more than 60 countries.

ALCIVIA's members, vendors, and co-op partners play roles in food production so protecting their data is critical. Despite their Microsoft 365 email security tools and an additional third-party secure email gateway (SEG), the co-op's small IT team struggled to keep up with rising numbers of credential phishing attacks. The team was also trying to keep up with user-reported graymail—and the SEG itself.

"The solution wasn't working well for us," said Peter Wolter, Director of IT. "We were spending too much time adjusting safelists and blocklists." Wolter said the breaking point was the number of false positives caused by the rigidity of the SEG lists, which required the team to divert resources to retrieving missing messages.

“Threat actors are already using AI, so we use Abnormal's human behavior AI to protect our email ecosystem and its data. When Abnormal makes a fast, accurate decision about an email, based on tens of thousands of threat signals, we're doing our customers a service and protecting ourselves.”
- Peter Wolter, Director of IT

The ALCIVIA team heard positive things about Abnormal from some of their co-op partners and from their CrowdStrike representative. Because Abnormal is API-based and designed to work with M365, setting up a proof of value (POV) was a matter of a few clicks.

Upon integration, Wolter received a one-line vendor invoice message with an attachment. He wasn't sure it was safe to open, so he reported it to Abnormal. "The response came within minutes: 'We checked the headers. It's coming from the right company. More than that, the PO number in the email is within the known range of PO numbers for this vendor.' Having that level of confidence was amazing," he said.

Wolter was impressed by the AI capabilities. "The volume of signals Abnormal looks at, we could never do on our own," he said. "And the false positive rate was less than half of 1%. After recovering an important email for our CEO that got falsely flagged and hidden by our old system, I told him what Abnormal's error rate was. He told me to get it done."

The POV made it easy to go live, said Thomas Riffle, Senior Systems Administrator and Service Desk Team Lead. "When we were ready it was very simple, like a flip of the switch."

Abnormal's API integration with Microsoft allows all email to come into the same place from the co-op's three domains. Wolter also liked the platform's account takeover protection tools and graymail sorting capability, which lets each user train the model by dragging promotional messages into a separate folder.

Now ALCIVIA has stronger protection, and integrating Abnormal with CrowdStrike endpoint protection added even more peace of mind. "When Abnormal catches and remediates a message with a malicious attachment, CrowdStrike notifies us," Riffle said. Abnormal also gives ALCIVIA's employees and IT team time back to work on core tasks and to innovate on behalf of their members. "Even if you could train your people to do what Abnormal does, who wants to come to work and do that?" Wolter said. "You need something as smart as Abnormal to protect your co-op."