Global 500 Financial Organization Moves to “Digital Everything” to Enhance Customer Experience and Email Security

• Analytics & Modeling - Machine Learning
• Analytics & Modeling - Natural Language Processing (NLP)

• Business Operation

• Fraud Detection

• Cybersecurity Services
• System Integration

To maintain trust and foster growth, the organization is transforming its global business operations to deliver “digital everything.” This requires a fresh look at each line of business and its supporting technologies, people, and functions to identify opportunities to reorganize, replatform, and accelerate their rate of digital change to become quicker and more competitive. During this transformation, the security operations team has a critical role in protecting assets, processes, and people. The team knew that even though the organization wasn’t having to deal with successful email attacks yet, they should keep looking for ways to enhance protection for their more than 34,000 inboxes worldwide. “Email is the most vulnerable area we have, because it requires humans to decide quickly whether or not to click a link or open an attachment. Blocking malicious emails before they reach a human is key,” said the company’s Director of Threat Intelligence. The organization’s proactive mindset led it to Abnormal. Rather than wait for an attack to succeed, “we took the next step in our email security evolution,” said the Associate VP of Security Operations.

As a leading Global 500 financial services company, the organization is responsible for nearly a trillion dollars in asset management, investor interests, and a global workforce. Its insurance, investment, financial advisory, and asset management services are trusted by customers across Canada, the United States, Asia, and Europe. With millions of customers, it’s important to this financial organization to protect their wealth, reduce their risk, and help them to reach their goals and live more rewarding, healthier lives.

Abnormal quickly uncovered a volume of email threats the organization hadn’t expected—more than 70 compromised vendors and more than 11,000 advanced email attacks per month bypassing the company’s secure email gateway. “We were fortunate that we did not have any problems, because Abnormal showed us that we had been interacting with compromised vendors and that thousands of attacks were bypassing our other two layers.” Abnormal is the organization’s final line of defense against advanced email threats and those that matter most, with IronPort dedicated to anti-spam, FireEye detecting advanced threat malware, and Abnormal providing protection against business email compromise and other socially-engineered attacks that the other two layers aren’t able to detect. As one of the organization’s security engineers explained, “Abnormal is catching things that our other two security platforms should’ve caught. It’s like this big wall of safety that complements and exceeds what the other tools are doing.” The fact that so many attacks were slipping through at an organization with two layers of email security already in place shows how sophisticated these threats have become. These attacks impersonate trusted vendors and avoid the known bad signals that other email security solutions are built to identify, like malicious payloads and suspicious links. Abnormal takes a different approach, using machine learning and natural language processing to separate known good email behaviors from those that signal fraud.

• Abnormal detected fraudulent vendor interactions through its proprietary VendorBase™, identifying compromised vendor accounts and preventing false payment information from stealing funds or account data.
• The platform’s comparison of vendor emails to its proprietary VendorBase™ immediately detected fraudulent vendor interactions, saving the organization an estimated $14 million in losses within the first six months.
• Abnormal’s advanced email fraud detection and proactive remediation capabilities are an ideal fit for an organization with a strong cybersecurity culture and a commitment to data privacy.

• Abnormal detected 77 attacks through VendorBase, saving the organization an estimated $14 million in losses within the first six months.
• Abnormal prevented more than 75,000 advanced email attacks on the organization during its first year.