FireEye updates Email Security with new threat detection and evasion defenses

FireEye revealed a number of new defenses that are now available on FireEye Email Security – Server Edition, in direct response to the changing cyber threat landscape.

“FireEye continues to keep pace with the most sophisticated attackers,” said Ken Bagnall, vice president of email security at FireEye. “With our knowledge gained on the front lines with our incident response experts, we build new techniques for detecting attacks and attempts to bypass defenses. The speed and flexibility with which an email security solution adapts separates the good from the best. FireEye Email Security – Server Edition continues to detect an average of over 14,000 malicious emails per customer per month that get past other email security services.”

Adding executive impersonation protection to FireEye Email Security – Server Edition

Malware-less attacks are becoming a prevalent concern. In fact, FireEye has seen a rise in business email compromise over the past few years through executive impersonation attacks. According to the latest FireEye Email Threat Report, 19 percent of all malware-less attacks took this form in the first half of 2018. Impersonation attacks continue to be significant because adversaries are finding that people will often react to an email when it appears to be from an executive.

“While executive impersonation protection has become a commonplace feature within cloud-based email security solutions, this has not been the case on-premises,” continued Bagnall. “We’ve added executive impersonation protection to FireEye Email Security – Server Edition as a direct response of customer feedback that they are seeing more impersonation emails getting through their existing security services. This update is designed to catch what other security solutions are missing.”

Executive names are used as display names in fraudulent emails to fool employees into taking action. This new FireEye capability protects employees from display name and header spoofing. Inbound mail headers are analyzed and cross-referenced with a Riskware policy created by the administrator, and headers that do not align with the policy and/or show signs of impersonation activity can be flagged.

In addition to the executive impersonation protection capabilities, FireEye Email Security – Server Edition incorporates several other new features designed to combat emerging threat vectors while enhancing performance. These include:

• Attachment Detonation Customization (Guest Images): There is an amount of malware programmed to execute under certain circumstances to evade sandbox detection. These evasion techniques limit file execution to behavior relating to the target organization. Administrators can now create a guest image which can ‘fool’ the file into executing, for example, creating browser history or defining ‘recently opened files’.
• Full URL Rewrite: This new security capability protects end users from malicious links by rewriting all URLs contained in an email.
• Passwords in Images: In direct response to the attack techniques seen by FireEye incident response teams, and a rapid innovation cycle, the detection Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX) engine can now use passwords embedded as images within emails to analyze the related password-protected files. Most sandboxes are unable to analyze password-protected files.
• New Machine Learning Engine: FireEye’s machine learning engine, MalwareGuard, is now available for FireEye Email Security – Server Edition. Under development for two years, this detection engine helps defend against emerging and new threats that often bypass traditional security solutions. Using machine learning models trained with data sets collected and labeled by FireEye and Mandiant researchers from real-world attacks, MalwareGuard classifies malware without human involvement and before signatures are available.

These new features are available in the latest version of FireEye Email Security – Server Edition (8.2). A free email threat analysis is also available for authorized FireEye partners worldwide.

Combining a FireEye Threat Intelligence subscription with FireEye Email Security is the way for organizations to establish the agility that is needed to stay one step ahead of attackers.