Anti-Spear Phishing and BEC Detection for Email Security Vendors

Enhance your email security with advanced AI and Natural Language Processing to detect malicious emails and targeted attacks

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A Business Email Compromise (BEC) attack is an increasingly growing cybercrime that targets specific individuals or businesses. Attackers use impersonation and language-based tactics to deceive victims into taking certain actions, to make illicit financial gains, or extract sensitive business information. With Deep Learning AI and the latest advances in Natural Language Processing, Sophos has built powerful technology that accurately detects the tone and malicious patterns used in such targeted email attacks. The technology allows email security vendors to expand their value proposition with BEC prevention and anti-spear phishing capabilities.

The Challenge of Detection

Traditional email security controls that rely on signature-based detection, reputation intelligence, and spam filters cannot identify and block targeted email attacks. Findings from many recent industry reports confirm this, as the data reveals a steady rise in hand-crafted BEC and spear phishing attacks. The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) recently identified $51 billion in exposed losses due to Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks.

  • Sophos’ latest 2023 Threat Report reveals the rise of the "Phishing-as-a-Service" model. The Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR 2023) adds more evidence to this and observes pretexting or BEC and spear phishing threats becoming more prevalent than other forms of social engineering attacks
  • Instead of the usual tradecraft that involves malware-laden emails with malicious attachments or URLs, attackers deploy highly targeted social engineering, adopting the language and tone that senior executives or trusted sources use
  • Scammers deceive their unsuspecting victims by posing as trustworthy sources or individuals and use language that conveys urgency or authority to extract sensitive information or persuade them to take certain actions, like transferring money, updating passwords, and modifying shipping orders or invoices. Attackers use extracted details to commit more cybercrimes and cause greater financial and reputational damage and yet manage to remain undetected

Sophos’ BEC and Anti-Spear Phishing Technology for Email Security Vendors

Purpose-built for Targeted Email Threats

Sophos’ BEC and Anti-Spear Phishing solution is built using breakthrough technologies in data science and Deep Learning from the Sophos AI team. The neural network-based model leverages the latest advances in Natural Language Processing to detect malicious patterns, tone, executive impersonation language, and semantics that go into crafting such targeted email attacks.

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Real AI. Real Impact.

Sophos’ AI innovation has been trained on billions of natural language inputs, and it is able to detect hand-crafted, never-seen-before, Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks with near zero false positives and 90% detection accuracy. This hugely supplements email security solutions that are based on signature-based detection and can identify only recurring malicious patterns.

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Multiple Layers of Defense for Email Security Vendors

Sophos offers a comprehensive and scalable platform to email security partners for detecting and categorizing advanced threats. Sophos OEM partners can select appropriate solutions from various technologies to supplement their own email security as their customers’ needs evolve, including anti-malware and anti-spam engines, phishing threat intelligence, DLP, email sandbox, and AI models for detecting BEC and spear phishing threats.

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Proven Partnerships with Leading Messaging Security Partners

The Sophos OEM team brings proven expertise in supporting various integration requirements and messaging security use cases. With dedicated account managers, integration engineers, and a support team, Sophos OEM partners can quickly deliver enhanced security value and easily launch unique email security solutions.

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Cloud Container Security

Sophos is helping OEM security partners become the enabler of secure deployments. Sophos technology can be deployed in a container environment to meet data privacy concerns and can integrate with existing cloud-native tools and processes.

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Join the Leader in OEM Cybersecurity

Become a Sophos OEM partner and transform your business with easy-to-integrate and easy-to-use OEM cybersecurity technologies.

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