Abnormal security raises $200 million to thwart phishing emails

Today, cloud native email security platform Abnormal Security it has raised $210 million as part of a Series C financing round, bringing the company’s valuation to $4 billion. Abnormal Security’s customer base has grown 270% and includes companies such as Xerox, Hitachi Vantara, Urban Outfitters, Groupon, Royal Caribbean International and Auto Club Group-AAA.

Implemented via API, Abnormal Security’s solution is designed to detect social engineering attempts and malicious emails that traditional email gateways lack, with automated email triaging, remediation, and reporting.

For enterprises, Abnormal provides a potential solution to email-based attacks, such as Business Email Compromise (BEC) attempts, which have historically proven difficult to mitigate with traditional security measures alone.

Manipulators stop AI

The announcement comes as phishing attempts and BEC attacks have increased across the board, with 83% of organizations saying they have experienced a successful email-based phishing attack by 2021, up from 57% in 2020.

These attacks have increased as cybercriminals recognize that many organizations do not have the defenses to stop them.

“Modern attacks, including corporate email compromise, supply chain compromise, account takeover and more, are difficult to detect. Because they typically don’t include traditional indicators of compromise, they bypass legacy email security solutions like the Secure Email Gateway (SEG),” said Evan Reiser, CEO of Abnormal Security.

“Outdated SEGs overcomplicate email security and impose a significant operational burden on security teams,” said Reiser.

Abnormal Security’s answer to these challenges is to use AI to identify anomalous emails, detect and block malicious actors before they can do any damage. It’s an approach that doesn’t rely on the confidence of busy employees to have the security awareness to independently detect phishing threats.

The Global Email Security Market

Abnormal security is part of the growing global email security market, which researchers expect to reach $6.8 billion by 2025 as demand for phishing information grows and more companies deploy email security platforms to contain social engineering threats.

One of the main competitors of the organization is: Proofwhich was last announced revenue of $308.7 million in the second quarter of last year. Proofpoint provides an email security and protection solution that uses machine learning and real-time analytics to analyze and sandbox malicious emails.

Another competitor is mimecast, a cloud email cybersecurity service that can scan URLs in real time to detect malicious content, identify malware attachments with antiviruses, perform static file analysis, and behavioral sandboxing. Mimecast has announced that it will raise $147.2 million revenue in the 2nd quarter of 2022.

As a provider, Abnormal Security tries to differentiate itself from competitors through the use of behavioral AI.

“While our competitors use static rules and policy-based approaches that evaluate only known bad indicators of compromise, Abnormal uses behavioral AI to determine known good user behavior and accurately detect anomalies,” said Reiser.