Phishing security vendor aims to provide a collaborative defense, enabling humans to become a strong link in the email security chain.
Phishing and email security is big business in 2018. On Feb. 26, email security vendor PhishMe announced that it is being acquired by a private equity consortium that includes BlackRock and Pamplona Capital, valuing the company at $400 million.
As part of the acquisition, PhishMe is also being rebranded as Cofense, in a bid to help better define the company’s expanded vision of providing a collaborative defense for cyber-security.
«As a co-founder it was a difficult decision to change our name from PhishMe,»Aaron Higbee, CTO and co-founder of PhishMe/Cofense told eWEEK . «Our mantra is now that it is technology plus humans, that we can tap into, in order to defend our networks.»
PhishMe had raised a total of $58 million in funding across three rounds of venture capital investment since the company was founded in 2011. At the time the company raised its $13M Series B round in March 2015,CEO and co-founder Rohyt Belani told eWEEK that PhishMe’s goal was to positively influence employee behavior about phishing attacks.
Higbee noted that in the last two years, PhishMe realized that it can do more than simply train users to spot potential phishing attacks. Higbee said that PhishMe’s tools have been used to condition people to recognize suspicious emails, empower them to report the phishing emails, while giving security teams tools to do something about the reports.
«The things that we want to do in the near term is help security teams to remediate potential phishing attacks as quickly as possible,» Higbee said.
There are a number of different approaches that have been advocated in the cyber-security industry to help mitigate the risk associated with phishing. One such approach is Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, (DMARC), which is a protocol that helps protect the integrity and authenticity of email. The U. S. Government is among the backers of DMARC and is currently in the process of i mplementing it across federal agencies.
Higbee doesn’t see DMARC as a particularly effective approach at preventing all forms of phishing attacks.
«While DMARC is a good technology to prevent the straight-up spoofing of a domain name in an email ‘from’ line, it hasn’t phased or slowed down attackers at all,» Higbee said.
An increasingly expensive form of phishing is a Business Email Compromise (BEC) attack, in which the attacker spoofs a legitimate email business contact to trick a victim into paying a fraudulent invoice. In May 2017, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), reported that BEC scams have led to $5.3 billion in financial loses globally since October 2013. Among the most recent publicly reported incidents was revealed on Feb. 21, when IBM Security reported that it discovered a BEC attack responsible for $5 million in fraud.
In Higbee’s view, his company’s existing platform which enables users to report suspicious email, can be an effective tool to help combat BEC attacks. Other approaches to blocking BEC typically involve simply validating known good email addresses, which Higbee said often isn’t enough.
Looking forward, Higbee said that Cofense has a series of new product launches scheduled for the coming months that will further extend the company’s capabilities.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
