Rubicon Reduces Waste and Increases Efficiency with API-Based Email Security

Rubicon provides full-service waste management, recycling, and smart city technology solutions, and serves more than 7,000 customers across 20 countries. To support their cloud operations and commitment to agility as well as secure a complex email ecosystem against email threats that can waste valuable operational, marketing, legal, and customer time, Rubicon knew they needed an API-based email security solution.

Rubicon’s mission is to reduce waste of all kinds. This requires a workforce that is highly diverse, highly skilled, highly talented, and always innovating, which necessitates constant communication that creates opportunities for threat actors to inject themselves into email conversations.

Among Rubicon’s biggest challenges were:

• Securing the complex email ecosystem and multi-cloud environment.

• Reducing waste and inefficiencies caused by business email compromise and other advanced attacks.

• Helping customers avoid email attacks to strengthen their business position.

“Doing our risk assessment/Proof of Value with Abnormal went very smoothly,” said George Insko, VP of Cybersecurity at Rubicon. “Because of the way Abnormal uses APIs and cloud security, it was able to look at our whole entire environment within five minutes. We started getting good, actionable intelligence within 24 hours.”

Abnormal empowered Rubicon’s security team with the visibility to see where the specific and targeted attacks were—insights they previously lacked. “It allowed us to quickly realize where our gaps and deficiencies were,” said Insko. “It makes people like myself in the cybersecurity world very relaxed in inserting it into their enterprise environment. There's very little risk there.”

As a best-of-breed company, Rubicon tries to partner with best-of-breed companies. “Abnormal is definitely an A-level player,” said Insko.

“We selected Abnormal for email security because it helped us reduce waste and helped our employees be more proficient with their jobs. It also was a proactive step in securing email because of the artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

He also appreciated the fact that Abnormal explains email attacks in detail and includes an in-depth Threat Log for messages marked as malicious. “The user interface gives you reasons why things have happened. Old school security email gateways don't do that.”

“Having a next-generation API-based solution is super important. If you want to be agile, it has to be in the cloud. It needs to be able to be fired up and look across all your platforms instantaneously.” - George Insko, VP of Cybersecurity

• No missed attacks over more than eight months with no false positives.
• Reduced security team email tasks from four hours to 15 minutes per day.
• Provides greater visibility into email threats across the supply chain.
• Gives intelligence to share with customers to prevent attacks.

With Abnormal, Rubicon’s security team spends 15 minutes a day on email security tasks, instead of entire mornings.

“Now that we have Abnormal and we have eliminated the waste of going through copious amounts of email alerts and false positives, our team is able to focus on more strategic initiatives. It allows us to do gap analysis and really strengthen Rubicon's overall architectures and defensive mechanisms and layers.”

Rubicon also shares the intelligence they receive from Abnormal with their customers to make the entire email ecosystem more secure and more efficient. “VendorBase™ insights help us remove waste from our customers’ email streams to make sure that they’re successful too,” Insko said.

“Not all of our customers are multimillion- or billion-dollar companies, so using Abnormal to help our customer base stay secure and avoid the waste caused by business email compromise is really rewarding.”