How Many Phishing Emails Do Security Solutions Miss?

S E C U R E Y O U R E V E R Y T H I N G

2HOW MANY PHISHING EMAILS DO SECURITY SOLUTIONS MISS?

Executive Summary In a new study, Avanan analyzed over 300 million emails to determine the efficacy of vendors at keeping phishing

emails out of the end-users inbox.

Measuring such results is only possible through Avanan’s unique positioning. With our embedded approach behind

Microsoft, Google, and SEGs like Proofpoint, Mimecast and Barracuda, we see the attacks that they miss. This allows

us to analyze their true miss rate.

In this study, we analyzed emails over a course of six months, from April 2021 to October 2021. We measured the num-

ber of phishing emails hitting the inbox per every 100,000 messages. According to our findings, we found that legacy

approaches consistently allow far more phishing emails into the inbox than Avanan.

Avanan stops the attacks that others miss, which is one reason for the large discrepancy between our solution and the others.

When analyzing other solutions, we need not go far to see examples of attacks that all these other companies missed. In

this report, we’ll examine some real-world attacks that were missed by legacy solutions and ended up in the user’s inbox.

3HOW MANY PHISHING EMAILS DO SECURITY SOLUTIONS MISS?

Mimecast In this attack that Mimecast missed, hackers leverage sites that are already on static allow lists. To do so, they embed phishing content with these services, in this case, Adobe Spark. Because Adobe is a major company that’s often trusted by users, it’s on Allow Lists, and so it sails through to the inbox, regardless of whether phishing content has been embedded on the platform. According to Avanan research, 8.14% of phishing emails ended up in the user’s inbox due to an Allow or Block list misconfiguration. When using an SEG like Mimecast, that number rises to 15.4%.

4HOW MANY PHISHING EMAILS DO SECURITY SOLUTIONS MISS?

Google The static HTML file in this email may look harmless, and Google thought so as well. However, when clicking on the HTML attachment, the user is directed to a webpage that looks a lot like an Excel spreadsheet.

When entering a password, it immediately gets stolen by the hackers.

5HOW MANY PHISHING EMAILS DO SECURITY SOLUTIONS MISS?

Proofpoint In this email missed by Proofpoint, end-users see what looks like a payment confirmation notice.

One of the many reasons our AI detected this as phishing was due to an insignificant historical reputation with the sender. Our research has found that 84.3% of all phishing emails do not have a significant historical reputation with the victim.

6HOW MANY PHISHING EMAILS DO SECURITY SOLUTIONS MISS?

Microsoft Many attacks leverage popular apps. This attack, missed by ATP, pretends to be a request for a Zoom call. However, the Zoom meeting ID is static, and the link is malicious.

Barracuda In this attack, hackers are sending emails from a trusted user. The hacker adds a header that says, “This sender is trusted,” allowing the end- user to believe that email can, in fact, be trusted. On the contrary, the PDF logo is actually just a large image, with an embedded link that leads to a credential harvesting website. According to our research, credential harvesting scams make up 54% of all attacks.

7HOW MANY PHISHING EMAILS DO SECURITY SOLUTIONS MISS?

What Makes Avanan So Effective? Avanan’s patented approach to email security clearly protects inboxes better than legacy options. Avanan is an API-enabled email security provider, embedded within cloud email. Being embedded is critical to establishing an AI and ML-based detection system. By training our AI on a robust set of data and the attacks that others miss, we’re able to provide a far superior catch rate with more capabilities and can install in just five minutes.

Additionally, as a Check Point company, Avanan’s SmartPhish integrates with Check Point’s ThreatCloud, a threat intelligence database that includes 42 separate machine learning and AI engines. These engines do 86,000,000,000 transactions a day, finding over 7,000 previously unknown malware and zero-day malware per day. By combining superior email security with superior threat intelligence, Avanan’s email security offering has established itself as the clear market leader.

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