Gateway Church Focuses on Its Mission to Secure Trust with Its Congregants and Staff

Industry: Religious Organization
Location: Southlake, TX
Protected Mailboxes: 3,000+

Challenges:

• Targeted by regular phishing attempts, fraudulent invoices, and church member and staff impersonations
• Many attacks bypassed Defender for Office 365
• Security team bandwidth consumed by mitigating these email attacks

Business Impact:

• Instant API-based integration into existing Microsoft 365 deployment
• Immediate and automatic mitigation of email attacks
• Comprehensive visibility into the types of attacks, key recipients, attacker strategy, and attacker origin
• Blocked 112,000 email attacks to date
• 3,000 mailboxes protected against ransomware, phishing, social engineering, impersonation, and spam and graymail

Gateway Church is a Bible-based, evangelistic church founded in 2000. The church has more than 100,000 members attending each weekend across its nine campuses. It also streams services to more than 300,000 people. Gateway has established itself as one of the nation’s most celebrated faith-based institutions.

The church contends with the ever-evolving advanced email threat landscape on a global scale. As with all major organizations, threat actors attempt to disrupt its operations and communications with email attacks involving ransomware, fraud, phishing, and impersonation. In 2021, sophisticated threats increased with thousands of attacks that passed Microsoft 365 email defenses. However, with Abnormal we protected the integrity of our email communications with our continued defense-in-depth approach.

Gateway chose Abnormal Security because of its uncompromising, precision-based approach to prevent the email attacks that matter most. It augmented Defender with Abnormal’s behavioral AI and ML, which parses known good behavior to develop a deep understanding of people, relationships, and business context. Abnormal applies this to detect and stop socially-engineered email attacks before they reach individual mailboxes. Since deploying Abnormal, Gateway has not experienced a single successful advanced email attack.

Abnormal identifies and stops advanced email threats with such a high level of accuracy that we can focus on ministering to people, rather than spending our time recovering from email attacks. The solution is amazing and reduces our support workloads.
- Matt Manire, Executive Director of Information Security