Enterprise Security, Platform Security, Software Security
Business Wire | August 10, 2023
Abnormal Security, the leading behavioral AI-based email security platform, today announced CheckGPT, used to detect AI-generated attacks. The new capability determines when email threats, including business email compromise (BEC) and other socially-engineered attacks, have likely been created using generative AI tools.
Cybercriminals are constantly evolving their attack tactics to evade detection by security defenses, and generative AI is the newest weapon in their arsenal. Using tools like ChatGPT or its malicious cousin WormGPT, threat actors can now write increasingly convincing emails, scaling their attacks in both volume and sophistication. In its latest research report, Abnormal observed a 55% increase in BEC attacks over the previous six months—with the potential for volumes to increase exponentially as generative AI becomes more widely adopted.
“The degree of email attack sophistication is going to significantly increase as bad actors leverage generative AI to create novel campaigns,” said Karl Mattson, chief information security officer at Noname Security. “It's not reasonable that each company can become an AI security specialty shop, so we're putting our trust in Abnormal to lead the way in that kind of advanced email attack detection.”
Unlike traditional email security solutions, Abnormal takes a radically different approach to stopping advanced email attacks, making it particularly well-suited to the challenge of blocking AI-generated attacks. The unique API architecture ingests thousands of diverse signals to build a baseline of the known-good behavior of every employee and vendor in an organization based on communication patterns, sign-in events and thousands of other attributes. It then applies advanced AI models including natural language processing (NLP) to detect abnormalities in email behavior that indicate a potential attack.
After initial email processing, the Abnormal platform expands upon this classification by further processing email attacks to understand their intent and origin. The CheckGPT tool leverages a suite of open source large language models (LLMs) to analyze how likely it is that a generative AI model created the message. The system first analyzes the likelihood that each word in the message has been generated by an AI model, given the context that precedes it. If the likelihood is consistently high, it’s a strong potential indicator that text was generated by AI.
The system then combines this indicator with an ensemble of AI detectors to make a final determination on whether an attack was likely to be generated by AI. As a result of this new detection capability, Abnormal recently released research showing a number of emails that contained language strongly suspected to be AI-generated, including business email compromise and credential phishing attacks.
“As the adoption of generative AI tools rises, bad actors will increasingly use AI to launch attacks at higher volumes and with more sophistication,” said Evan Reiser, chief executive officer at Abnormal Security. “Security leaders need to combat the threat of AI by investing in AI-powered security solutions that ingest thousands of signals to learn their organization’s unique user behavior, apply advanced models to precisely detect anomalies, and then block attacks before they reach employees. While it’s important to understand whether an email was generated by a human or AI to understand and stay ahead of evolving threats, the right system will detect and block attacks no matter how they were created.”
About Abnormal Security
Abnormal Security provides the leading behavioral AI-based email security platform that leverages machine learning to stop sophisticated inbound email attacks and dangerous email platform attacks that evade traditional solutions. The anomaly detection engine leverages identity and context to analyze the risk of every cloud email event, preventing inbound email attacks, detecting compromised accounts, and remediating emails and messages in milliseconds—all while providing visibility into configuration drifts across your environment. You can deploy Abnormal in minutes with an API integration for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and experience the full value of the platform instantly, with additional protection available for Slack, Teams, and Zoom. More information is available at abnormalsecurity.com.
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Data Security, Platform Security, Software Security
Businesswire | July 20, 2023
Laminar, the leading agile data security platform provider, today announced it has added Microsoft SharePoint Online and Google BigQuery to its existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake. The additions make the Laminar Data Security Platform the first and only cloud-native data security solution to support all major cloud service providers (CSPs), leading data warehouses, and common software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications used by today’s top enterprises.
The cloud’s limitless potential is rooted in the data that an organization has, and what they do with it. To power innovation, 94% of enterprises use cloud services and applications. Microsoft SharePoint is the third most popular enterprise application, with 65% of its users adopting the cloud version, SharePoint Online. Employees routinely collaborate on shared content, and developers work with it as well to automate business processes, track progress, and share information across departments or with partners.
Similarly, Google BigQuery is one of the top three data warehouse solutions. It is a powerful analytics platform that excels at processing and analyzing massive volumes of data quickly and efficiently. With its scalable architecture and advanced querying capabilities, BigQuery enables organizations to gain valuable insights from their data in real time, empowering data-driven decision-making and accelerating business growth.
Both solutions enable developers, data scientists, and other innovators to be creative and extract the maximum value from their operational data. For instance, business intelligence staff may use these tools to analyze customer purchase patterns or sales trends, while data scientists may look out for hidden associations within the data to inform new strategies. Unfortunately, these same activities also open organizations up to significant risk by generating unknown or “shadow” data — a top concern for 93% of data security and governance professionals.
Data security needs to be agnostic to the infrastructure in which data resides. Security posture must also travel with the data, as it moves through the cloud and the related data warehouses and applications. By adding support for Microsoft SharePoint Online and Google BigQuery, customers using the Laminar Data Security Platform can now discover, classify, and secure data in even more environments. Thus, data security and governance teams can see and secure their organizations’ data consistently across the entire digital landscape.
"Data security is different, and more challenging in the cloud. Shadow data is everywhere and data security pros want to know where their sensitive data is, how it is accessed, used, and protected. Whether its structured, unstructured, managed, in SaaS, data warehouse, or embedded database” said Amit Shaked, CEO and Co-Founder, Laminar. “They are not experts in SaaS/PaaS/IaaS and certainly not individual data storage services. They want visibility into all their cloud data from a single source. Our continued support for the diversity of cloud environments, including now SaaS, means customers can have a unified, consistent approach to data security.”
The news continues Laminar’s ongoing product innovation, following the announcement of support for GCP and Snowflake, as well as data detection and response (DDR) and data access governance (DAG) capabilities.
About Laminar
Laminar is the leading agile data security platform and provides organizations with the visibility and control they need to achieve data security, governance, and privacy in the cloud. Our cloud-native data security solution continuously discovers and classifies all cloud data, structured and unstructured, across managed and self-hosted data stores, including unknown shadow data, without the data ever leaving your environment. It analyzes access, usage patterns, and security posture, and provides actionable, guided remediation for data security risk. Laminar connects to your multi-cloud environment including AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, BigQuery and SaaS applications via APIs and is agentless, asynchronous, and completely autonomous.
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Enterprise Security, Platform Security, Software Security
Business Wire | August 14, 2023
Detectify, the leading External Attack Surface Management platform powered by elite ethical hackers, today announced enhancements to its platform that can significantly help to elevate an organization’s visibility into its attack surface. Many organizations need help gaining visibility into the IP addresses across their whole environment. Detectify's new capabilities enable organizations to uncover unauthorized assets and ensure regulatory compliance.
The attack surface has grown exponentially, not least in how decentralized organizations have become. Over 10% of Detectify customers are hosting data across three continents, illustrating how their products and services are more global than ever. Detectify also notes that 30% of their customer base is leveraging more than 5 service providers, which reflects the growing trend in vulnerabilities as a result of human errors, like server misconfigurations. Moreover, organizations are quickly expanding their digital footprint, with 73% of Detectify customers using IPv6 addresses.
With the introduction of the new IP Addresses view, Detectify users gain seamless access to a comprehensive list of all IPs associated with their domains, accompanied by valuable insights, including hosting provider details, geographical locations, and Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs). This update is further complemented by interactive charts, enabling users to detect outlier countries or providers, and streamlining the process of identifying potential security concerns.
"It's not uncommon for our customers to encounter instances where unauthorized geolocations are used to spin up new machines or witness sudden spikes in hosting activities from approved countries,” said Danwei Tran Luciani, Interim VP of Product at Detectify. “These anomalies can expose organizations to risk, particularly when traditional automated detection methods fall short. Our new IP Addresses view empowers security teams to proactively address these challenges, strengthening their overall cybersecurity posture."
Detectify's new IP Addresses view provides security teams with tangible benefits to navigate complex attack surfaces, such as:
Uncovering unauthorized assets: For organizations with large attack surfaces, this capability allows users to identify unauthorized assets hosted by unapproved vendors. By instantly detecting an asset being hosted by a non-approved provider, security teams can take swift action and mitigate potential threats.
Ensuring regulatory compliance: For businesses operating in highly regulated environments where compliance is paramount, the new view is critical in determining the hosting locations of specific customer data. This enhanced visibility ensures adherence to regulatory requirements and fortifies data privacy measures.
The new IP Addresses view is now available to all Detectify customers, reinforcing the company's commitment to empowering security teams with cutting-edge solutions to safeguard organizations’ ever-evolving attack surfaces. For more information visit www.detectify.com
About Detectify
Detectify sets the standard for External Attack Surface Management (EASM), providing 99.7% accurate vulnerability assessments. Product security and AppSec teams trust Detectify to expose exactly how attackers will exploit their Internet-facing applications. The Detectify platform automates continuous real-world, payload-based attacks crowdsourced through its global community of elite ethical hackers, exposing critical weaknesses before it’s too late. Go hack yourself: detectify.com.
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