Owing to its dominant share of online productivity tools, Microsoft Office 365 is a favorite target with the cyber criminal crowd for email phishing and malware attacks. In response, many organizations have embraced multi-layered approaches to fortify their Office 365 security.
Along those lines, Vade Secure, a San Francisco-based developer of predictive email defense that says it protects the email of 5,000 customers and 500 million email inboxes, has launched a cloud-based solution that’s fully integrated into Office 365. Moreover, it features filtering capabilities powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and runs on Microsoft’s Azure platform, the company says.
According to the developer, the solution not only is powered by AI but is also supported by machine learning and data from its global threat centers to counter ransomware, phishing, spear phishing and a range of email-associated mine fields. It’s designed to home in on the 10 percent of of email threats tailored by bad actors to skirt the defense technologies that other solutions use. Vade Secure initially introduced the platform last November at the same time as it closed a $12 million funding round. Perhaps its 50 percent revenue increase in 2016 and continued growth last year helped to convince French investor ISAI of its future prospects in the niche market.
Vade Secure: Channel Sales Strategy
Vade Secure said its sales targets include major ISPs, OEMs, SMBs, and enterprises worldwide, making it a fit for Microsoft’s cloud-first, partner-first strategy and a purposeful addition to the security portfolios of Microsoft partners, cloud solution providers (CSPs), and managed service providers (MSPs) for their Office 365 customers.
“Hackers are increasingly targeting Office 365 users with email-based attacks as an entry point to exploit data, files, and contacts from other Office 365 apps,” said Adrien Gendre, Vade Secure chief solution architect. “While native Office 365 security catches most spam and known threats, many organizations are strengthening their defenses with a layered approach. Vade Secure for Office 365 complements tools like Exchange Online Protection, leveraging artificial intelligence to block advanced phishing, spear phishing, and malware attacks,” Gendre said.
The company provided a list of Vade Secure’s benefits:
- Ease of deployment: Administrators can authorize Vade Secure to access their email flow and configure their filtering policies—no MX record changes required.
- Native user experience: The solution is fully transparent, allowing end users to continue using the familiar Office 365 interface without a separate quarantine.
- Insider threat protection: Vade Secure scans internal messages sent between employees to protect against attacks originating within the organization.
Specific AI and machine learning benefits:
- Anti-phishing: Crawls suspicious URLs and pages in real time, following any redirections to determine whether the final page is fraudulent. The solution performs this analysis both when the message is received and any time a user clicks.
- Anti-spear phishing: Builds an anonymous profile that establishes employees’ normal communication patterns. Upon detecting spoofing attempts, a fully customizable banner is displayed within the email alerting the user.
- Anti-malware and ransomware: Machine learning algorithms analyze the origin, content, and context of emails and their attachments to block unknown, polymorphic malware.
