Paragon Chooses Human Behaviour AI Solution for Improved Email Security

Paragon is a leading provider of transformational business services. The company combines leading-edge technology and exceptional people to deliver business-critical products and services that achieve enhanced performance for clients.

Paragon prioritises security to protect clients and their customers from email-related breaches. “Our clients trust us to keep their data safe, use it in the right way, and remove it when it’s no longer needed,” said Andy Finn, Head of Security & Technology Assurance.

Paragon’s security challenge is complicated by the need to integrate data from acquired companies. “You're migrating things, changing tooling, deploying different software, and removing legacy software. There are compliance requirements around data retention,” Andy said. Each acquisition also expands the number of employees, vendors, and clients whose email needs to be analysed to detect potential attacks.

As a large business handling sensitive data, Paragon requires the highest level of security, so they needed a solution that supplemented their existing email security stack.

“We needed future-proof, cutting-edge email security that looks at detection factors that legacy solutions can’t. With Abnormal, we always know we’ve caught and eliminated everything that we need to.”
—Perry Satchwell-Cox, Head of Security Operations

Paragon wanted a solution that would free the security team from investigation and remediation tasks, could scale easily, and would keep pace to prevent evolving threats. In addition, the ideal solution needed to classify email accurately.

The human behaviour AI-based, risk-aware Abnormal platform baselines known-good user behaviour quickly to identify threats that make it past legacy defences. Abnormal scales easily, even across complex cloud email ecosystems, and automatically remediates malicious emails. These features allow security teams to put email protection on autopilot with confidence.

Paragon found Abnormal simple to use. “There was no messing about with implementation,” said Perry Satchwell-Cox, Head of Security Operations. “In the email space, we’re wary of causing disruption. A lot of security solutions are complicated and require a lot of time on configuration, but Abnormal is very easy.”

Abnormal also quickly proved its value. Early in the Proof of Value (POV), Abnormal identified a vendor email compromise attack in progress and alerted Paragon. “Abnormal advised that we should look at this potential vendor because the message wasn’t coming from the proper source. Our finance team was contacted and was requested to change bank details. Although we have rigorous checks in place before any change would be implemented, it was reassuring that Abnormal raised this request to us,” Perry said. Abnormal also stopped spam and generated just two false positives in two years.

“Email attacks on end users are one of the biggest security risks any company has. With Abnormal, we have no concerns regarding our email security posture and have no requirement to perform internal manual investigations. That frees up our security operations team to focus on strategic projects that benefit our business and protect our clients.”
—Andy Finn, Head of Security & Technology Assurance

The Abnormal behavioural AI-based solution gives Paragon confidence that their email security will remain strong, regardless of changes in attacker strategies. “The email space isn’t stagnant, but I’ve used previous security platforms that are static, with no innovation. Abnormal is different in that regard. It’s also intuitive, it has good reporting, and it just works,” said Perry. “Abnormal gives our security team and our users a level of confidence that our email is protected, and that trust is a massive benefit.”