16 Apr 10 Hot Email Security Companies To Watch in 2022

AI and cloud integration are helping keep inboxes safe

– David Braue

Melbourne, Australia – Feb. 15, 2022

Email filtering software has been around for ages, but its role as protector of the enterprise gateway has spawned a cycle of innovation as vendors embrace and refine artificial intelligence techniques to dramatically increase the accuracy and specificity of email security.

AI’s value has increased dramatically with the evolution of cybercriminal attacks, which are increasingly shifting from signature-based attachment and URL scanners towards the crafty language and semantic manipulations of business email compromise (BEC) attacks that continue to extract billions from unwitting victims.

Combined with cloud-based architectures and increasingly accurate email filters that collect and learn from threat-intelligence data gathered by users around the world, today’s email-security tools are more effective than ever — and they need to be, given the ongoing threat posed by cybercriminals and their ever-morphing ransomware, Trojan and other attacks.

Cybercrime Radio: Keeping Office 365, Gmail, and Slack Safe

Gil Friedrich, CEO at Avanan

Throw in the complexities of home working — which put many employees outside the conventional protections of email security systems — and it’s clear why protecting this communications channel has never been more important.

Your cyber defenses need to work 100 percent all the time, as the saying goes, but cybercriminals only need to get through them once. 

Hot Email Security Companies

Who’s who in the email security space? Here’s 10 hot companies the editors at Cybercrime Magazine are watching in 2020, and you should too.

• Abnormal Security, San Francisco, Calif. Integrates with cloud email platforms, using AI-based behavioral data science to baseline known good behavior and block anomalies such as business email compromise (BEC) attacks.
• Agari, Forster City, Calif. Agari not only brings AI-based protection to leading cloud collaboration platforms — leveraging over 300m daily data points to continually refine its detection — but also offers increasingly crucial DMARC protections to stop email spoofing and brand impersonation in its tracks.
• Avanan, New York, N.Y. Cloud email security provider Avanan uses patented API-based integration with Microsoft Office 365, G-Suite, and Slack to scan communications traffic for phishing, malware, and data leakage before it’s delivered — providing a transparent layer of security for the entire productivity suite.
• DarkTrace, Cambridge, U.K. DarkTrace’s AI-based Antigena Email learns from the context of emails — considering thousands of data points related to the sender, recipient, and wider organization to understand the “human” behind the email, and spot anomalous behavior.
• IronScales, Marietta, Ga. Billed as a “self-learning email security platform,” IronScales is a cloud-native, API-based security platform that detects and remediates BEC, spearphishing, supply chain and other attacks at the inbox level.

• MailGuard, Melbourne, Australia. Part of a stack of content-security tools, MailGuard’s cloud-based email filtering leverages AI threat-detection engines to monitor new and emerging threats — distributing updates to customers in 27 countries so quickly that it claims to be 2 to 48 hours “ahead of the market in preventing fast-breaking attacks.”
• Menlo Security, Palo Alto, Calif. Menlo has taken a radical approach to email security, using technology called Isolation Core to execute email and web content in its cloud-based environment rather than on user endpoints — preventing any malicious content from getting anywhere near the user’s system.
• Mimecast, London, U.K. Links email and Office 365 security, impersonation detection and brand protection with contextual awareness training to reinforce potential compromises at the time a user clicks something they shouldn’t have.
• Proofpoint, Sunnyvale, Calif. Established email security vendor has leaned heavily on its NexusAI to protect email by authenticating senders, analyzing content in secure sandboxes, identify risky users, rewrite URLs, and more.
• Tessian, London, U.K. Billing itself as a Human Layer Security platform, Tessian leverages machine learning to create a baseline of network activity, then monitor a real-time dashboard for variations from that normal that indicate a potential security issue, regardless of email platform.

Cybercrime Magazine will be expanding our coverage of email security and this list in 2022.

– David Braue is an award-winning technology writer based in Melbourne, Australia.

Go here to read all of David’s Cybercrime Magazine articles.

About Avanan 

Avanan is a cloud email security platform that pioneered and patented a new approach to prevent sophisticated attacks. We use APIs to scan for phishing, malware, and data leakage in the line of communications traffic. This means we catch threats missed by Microsoft while adding a transparent layer of security for the entire suite and other collaboration tools like Slack.

Avanan catches the advanced attacks that evade default and advanced security tools. Its invisible, multi-layer security enables full-suite protection for cloud collaboration solutions such as Office 365™, G-Suite™, and Slack™.  The platform deploys in one click via API to prevent Business Email Compromise and block phishing, malware, data leakage, account takeover, and shadow IT across the enterprise. Avanan replaces the need for multiple tools to secure the entire cloud collaboration suite, with a patented solution that goes far beyond any other Cloud Email Security Supplement.