Page 44 - Cyber Warnings

The Automation Advantage

In today’s threat landscape, the time from phishing attack discovery to complete remediation must be
measured in minutes or hours, instead of the current standard of days and weeks. In some
instances, employee training may result in immediate attack discovery, but the attack will remain
persistent until the SOC team gets involved. Nonetheless, with so many security issues to investigate
and analyze, SOC teams are typically unable to meet the real-time attention demands that
suspicious emails now require.

Fortunately, advances in cybersecurity have led to the engineering of automation that, through
machine learning, can automatically respond to suspected phishing emails upon discovery. With
automation, enterprises can exponentially reduce risk by allowing any employee, based on his or her
proven awareness level – from the janitor to the CEO – to quarantine and remove suspicious emails
with just one click of a button. By doing so, companies can significantly limit the time in which
malicious emails reside in the inboxes of employees and lessen the SOC team’s workload by
reducing the manpower needed to analyze suspected attacks.

For some security professionals, however, company executives and board members, the concept of
an automated response is unnerving. To many SOC teams, automation implies that an abundance of
false positives are imminent. Some in leadership positions argue that the automatic quarantining of
emails, without verification of malice, could be perceived as intrusive. Additionally, many in IT
speculate that automation is simply too difficult and costly to integrate with business applications,
such as Office 365 and Gmail.

The question for enterprises is this: are existing concerns about automated phishing mitigation
enough to prevent them from adopting technology that can expedite the time from attack to
remediation to just minutes and reduce the risk of falling victim? For any company that’s fallen victim
to a phishing attack – the answer is likely no.

Ultimately, no amount of employee education will be sufficient enough to halt the global phishing
epidemic, but by adding automation into the mix, enterprises may finally have a fighting chance.

About the Author

Eyal Benishti is the founder and CEO of IRONSCALES, the first and only
multi-layered phishing mitigation solution to combine human intelligence with
machine learning. He can be reached at [email protected].

44 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – September 2016 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide