Abnormal Security raises $24M to protect orgs from targeted email attacks

Abnormal Security announced the launch of the company with $24M in Series A funding led by Greylock Partners and the general availability of its cloud email security platform.

Abnormal Security protects organizations from the most sophisticated, targeted email attacks, including unknown threats that existing solutions miss. Through unique composite analysis of identity, relationships and email content, the Abnormal Security platform stops attacks that lead to account takeover, financial damage and organizational mistrust.

Abnormal Security was founded in 2018 by CEO Evan Reiser and CTO Sanjay Jeyakumar, who previously built large scale machine learning platforms at TellApart, Twitter and Google. Abnormal Security is building a state of the art data science and behavioral analysis platform, applied to email security challenges.

The company is growing a very strong team including individuals from Twitter, Google, Amazon and leading security companies including Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoint, FireEye and Duo Security.

“The Greylock team connected us with over 50 Fortune 500 CIOs and CISOs for input on how to apply our unique experience to solve their greatest security risks,” said Evan Reiser, Abnormal Security CEO and co-founder.

“Every security leader had the same problem: account compromise, executive impersonation, and financial loss due to targeted email attacks that bypass conventional email security.

“Partnering with these top security organizations helped us design a new cloud-native architecture from the ground up that is fast to evaluate, simple to operate, and uniquely stops the most damaging attacks.”

Abnormal Behavior Technology (ABX)

The Abnormal Security platform provides unprecedented protection against targeted attacks by analyzing more sources of data than any other email security solution, including data beyond email.

Abnormal Behavior Technology (ABX) uses this rich set of organization-specific data to uniquely drive the Abnormal Identity Model, the Abnormal Relationship Graph and Abnormal Content Analysis.

• The Abnormal Identity Model builds profiles of employees and third parties such as vendors and customers using hundreds of attributes extracted from dozens of data sources.
• The Abnormal Relationship Graph understands the strength of relationships by evaluating the cadence, topics and tone of communication in addition to the frequency.
• Abnormal Content Analysis uses a variety of techniques such as computer vision and natural language processing to understand the context and meaning of communications.

No single approach is deterministic but analyzed as a whole, ABX results in exceptional detection efficacy. More than 70 percent of business email compromise attacks identified through Abnormal Security platform customer deployments were not initially blocked by secure email gateway solutions.

Unlike traditional secure email gateways that require organizations to re-configure email routing that leads to delivery interruptions and potential outages, Abnormal Security integrates via Office 365 and G Suite API’s with just one click and requires no configuration.

It integrates outside of the mail flow so that there are no delays in email delivery and provides critical visibility into internal email to detect compromised accounts and stop internal email attacks.

The Abnormal Security platform is currently deployed across a range of industries, including numerous Fortune 500 enterprises, many of whom helped shape the product to fit their most pressing security needs as they move to the cloud.

“The acceleration of mobile technologies, the cloud, social media and Internet of Things in the enterprise environment has resulted in a larger playing field for cybercriminals to take advantage of.

“Prior to Abnormal Security, we relied on a secure email gateway to mitigate risk from business email compromise but recognized the need for additional protection,” said Joseph Kamau, CSO at Freedom Financial Network.

“Abnormal Security provided a frictionless implementation with minimal operational impact on our people, data, and business processes. By applying contextual, data science-based intelligence to a mailbox and analyzing behavior, Abnormal Security uniquely and effectively shored up our email security stack.”

Asheem Chandna and Saam Motamedi, Partners at Greylock and Abnormal Security Board Directors, said, “Despite extensive investment into the email security stack, socially-engineered email attacks continue to cost organizations billions of dollars annually in reported losses.

“The most sophisticated attacks bypass existing secure email gateways, requiring a fundamentally new technical approach. Abnormal Security continues our tradition of partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs to help solve problems that represent large market opportunities.”