Egress has launched its Abuse Mailbox Automation solution to make it easier for users to report phishing emails. The AI-powered feature will inspect and remediate attacks automatically. The company claims that this will cut analyst investigation time by 98%.
Tony Pepper, CEO of Egress, said, “Cybersecurity teams are stretched thin, and their organisations are ultimately at increased risk of an advanced phishing attack slipping through the net. Our Abuse Mailbox Automation responds to email threats within seconds, streamlining investigations, significantly reducing time to response and the associated resource drain.”
What does Abuse Mailbox Automation do?
The new feature is part of the Egress Defend solution designed to prevent phishing attacks. Its goal is to reduce the amount of time that security analysts spend investigating abuse reports. Egress estimates that as many as 85% of emails reported to abuse mailboxes are false positives.
Even when a report is legitimate, analysts will have still invested over 30 minutes investigating. Much of that time is spent writing scripts. The problem with this, according to Egress, is that the rise of polymorphic attacks means scripts are unreliable. All of these are manual tasks that Egress wants to automate.
What Egress wants to do with Abuse Mailbox Automation is remove all of that work from analysts. By using AI and automation, it believes that it can deal not only with false positives but also with most phishing emails. Once the AI has detected a phishing campaign, it can then begin to remediate subsequent attacks.
For more advanced scenarios, such as polymorphic attacks, it believes the speed of the AI will allow it to adapt to the attack.
To make it easier for users to report potential email abuse, the company supports a range of reporting mechanisms. Emails can be forwarded to the Defend Email Summary page. Users can also use the Egress Message Reporting web add-in for Microsoft Outlook or any other third-party tool.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Organisations throw significant resources into the problem of phishing and other malicious emails. The problem is that nothing seems to stem the tide of what gets through to users’ inboxes. When they do get through, there is every chance of a user clicking on one. That increases if the users believe that the technology is catching all the bad stuff.
Egress has its own tools for reducing what gets through but also focuses on better user training, which results in more reports. Now, it wants to reduce the impact of those reports on security analysts.
By using a combination of AI and automation, it believes that it can reduce the impact of email abuse by a whopping 98%. Is that feasible? Only an analysis of multiple customers can show that. However, any reduction in the time lost will be widely welcomed by hard-pressed cybersecurity teams.
If it is successful, it will increase pressure on Egress to add further AI-powered solutions and more automation to reduce time. It will be interesting to see what Egress targets next.
