The New Email Security Technologies Powered by XGen™

Credit to Author: Chris Taylor| Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2017 13:00:05 +0000

Today we are excited to introduce new email security technologies powered by XGen® and a new product, Smart Protection for Office 365. This new service combines the advantages of both an email gateway with an API service integrated solution to provide complete threat protection for Microsoft Office 365. It helps address the complete threat lifecycle of email attacks with protection, detection, and response:

Protection against incoming threats:

  • Powerful Business Email Compromise (BEC) detection using artificial intelligence to examine email for attack characteristics and intention
  • New pre-execution machine learning for antimalware finds more unknown malware before the sandbox layer to increase protection while improving email delivery.

Detection of threats already inside your organization:

  • Detects already in progress by scanning internal email (between two users of the same organization) for fraud and advanced threats. In multi stage attacks, criminals send phishing emails internally from a trusted user via a compromised device or stolen account credentials.

Response to attacks:

  • On-demand scan finds malware or indicators of an attack inside mailboxes and OneDrive for discovery and remediation

Why add more security to Microsoft Office 365?

Email is attackers favorite tool and responsible for 79 percent of ransomware and 76 percent of targeted attacks. Thus email protection is one of your organization’s most important security layers. Microsoft Office 365 E3 plans and below include some protection against known malware using basic antivirus technologies. The problem is 90 percent of malware today is unknown which requires different set of techniques. To make matters worse, Microsoft Office 365 success in becoming the standard for email services in turn makes it advantageous and easy for attackers to QA test their attacks against Microsoft Office 365.

XGen® uses a cross-generational blend of threat detection methods and our customers report a 90 percent reduction in security incidents after installing Trend Micro. Smart Protection for Microsoft Office 365 includes Cloud App Security, an API integrated solution, which adds a second layer of protection to the native Microsoft Office 365 security. It has now protected customers from 6 million high-risk threats.

Based on our logs, a typical 10,000 user customer using Cloud App Security is protected every month from an additional 3000 known malware/URLs and 300 unknown malware not found by Microsoft Office 365 security.

New Email Fraud/BEC Detection

Even with training users struggle to detect fake CEO emails and other Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams. Our new A.I. based method mimics the decision-making tree of a security expert, using an Expert Rule System, to look at both attack characteristics and the intention of the email. A machine learning model then correlates the rules to more precisely identify fraudulent emails. Since specific users like the CEO are more likely to be spoofed, extra scrutiny is applied to high-profile users which are identified by the customer using Active Directory groups or by entering their email address. The new method has identified 14,000 BEC emails in the last 30 days.

New Pre-Execution Machine Learning based antimalware

Last year we introduce machine learning based antimalware on our endpoint security products and we are now the first email security vendor to integrate this technology. Since August 18th it has been available in our email gateway service (Hosted Email Security) and our service integrated solution (Cloud App Security). Pre-execution machine learning works in conjunction with sandboxing analysis and offers two advantages. First, while our sandbox includes a host of anti-evasion methods machine learning can identify malware which might evade a sandbox using a new and unseen technique. Second, machine learning finds unknown malware before the sandbox layer to improve the efficiency of email delivery. 

Smart Protection for Microsoft Office 365 includes these new technologies and gives you the advantages of both a gateway and service integrated solution.  The gateway provides pre-delivery against phishing, fraud, and advanced threats along with outbound compliance using DLP and encryption. The service integrated layer protects internal email, OneDrive and SharePoint and is able to search existing mailboxes and files for threats. The two components are connected with single sign-on and TrustScan technology prevents duplicate scanning.

You can learn more about Smart Protection for Microsoft Office 365 and try it for free at www.trendmicro.com/office365 and if you are at Microsoft Ignite this week, stop by for a demo.

http://feeds.trendmicro.com/TrendMicroSimplySecurity