Strengthening Communities Through Secure, Equitable Access to Education

Brian Markham, CISO:

So EAB is a technology research and services firm based out of Washington, D.C. that primarily serves the higher education industries.

Higher education has it so hard because they have these just monster attack surfaces.

With all of these disparate diverse stakeholders, it is very difficult to standardize on anything at all. So, if you can move from a model where you're getting some four-digit number of malicious emails in a month and take that down to a single-digit, or a double-digit number, that is a really big deal.

All of the potential scams and threats that never even reach your customers, and then they don't have to deal with it, they don't have to report it. Everybody saves time.

So the proof of value process with Abnormal was super easy. And once we got everything integrated, we kind of sat back for about two weeks and let it collect data. And then we had the follow-up call, and we saw all the things that it had caught. And it was far beyond what we had seen in the past.

So our users benefit from the value that we get from Abnormal every day. When I show them the numbers, when I show them that we know exactly who's getting targeted the most, how often, and with what, they're blown away by that. And they are grateful because they know that their inboxes are going to be cleaner, that they don't have to worry about slipping up, clicking on something, getting taken advantage of by a malicious actor.

At EAB, we believe in making education smarter and our community stronger. We believe in that in everything we do. We want education to be better because it is the best method of social mobility in our country and in our world. And by supporting that, we know that we're changing lives.

So I think for us, being a company that has built so many things cloud-native, understanding security in the cloud is super important to what we do as a team. Security really should enable the business. And cutting down on noise and clutter and getting all those threats just out of the way, that's how I feel like I'm really providing value.

The partnership with Abnormal from the beginning has been really great. The product does what it says that it does. And if I ever have a question or need anything, they get back to me quickly.

So honestly, this is really what you want from a relationship with a vendor. This is what optimal looks like.

Brian Markham, CISO:

One thing that Abnormal is super good at is detecting those compromised accounts.

I haven't seen an email security solution find as much stuff as I've seen with Abnormal. And I've worked with some very capable email security providers.

But very early on in our proof of concept, we were seeing things that we had never seen before get identified. And it was finding a lot more than the native security solution that we already had in place. So the contrast was just very clear.

So we know we've got a very strong foundation in getting a best-of-breed cloud-based email solution.