Phishing is a plague. Not only is it used to hack traditional businesses, it is often a way for hackers to get into networks which are attached to industrial control systems like the LockerGoga threat. This means electrical grids and other equipment is at risk if a user clicks on something they should not.
It is becoming apparent that traditional anti-phishing tools aren’t keeping up – in many cases they aren’t even being used.
Moreover, the problem is getting worse because 42% of phishing attacks are now polymorphic.
Polymorphism occurs when an attacker implements slight but significant and often random changes to an emails’ artifacts, such as its content, copy, subject line, sender name or template in conjunction with or after an initial attack has deployed. This strategic approach enables attackers to quickly develop phishing attacks that trick signature-based email security tools that were not built to recognize such modifications to threats; ultimately allowing different versions of the same attack to land undetected in employee inboxes.
Over the past 12 months, Israeli automated phishing prevention, detection and response platform IRONSCALES identified 11,733 email phishing attacks that underwent at least one permutation. In total, IRONSCALES recognized 52,825 permutations that impacted 209,807 inboxes across the world, reinforcing the ease and frequency at which attackers manipulate and repurpose a message’s artifacts to bypass email security tools, such as static protocols and signature-based detections.
As a result, IRONSCALES today announced that it has closed a $15 million Series B financing round led by returning investor K1 Investment Management. IRONSCALES will use the funding to enlarge its North American sales and marketing teams, and further invest in R&D for its AI-driven anti-phishing platform. Including the latest round, Tel Aviv-based IRONSCALES has now raised more than $25 million from K1 and Israel’s RDSeed since 2015.
We first covered the company in 2016 where we broke the news on the company’s $1.5 in funding.
IRONSCALES founder and CEO Eyal Benishti said, “While email phishing is the oldest and most recognizable cyberattack technique, it remains an extremely complex problem that today requires the power of both artificial and human intelligence in an ongoing cycle of innovation for it to have any positive effect on an organization’s security posture. K1 has always believed in our vision for modernizing email security, and we’re thankful once again for their continued deep operational assistance as IRONSCALES continues to build out our US operations.”
IRONSCALES reports triple-digit revenue growth over the past 12 months and its advanced phishing threat protection platform has nearly 1,000 customers across financial services, healthcare, retail, education and other industries. The company’s channel program has more than 50 partners including resellers, distributors, MSPs and MSSPs around the world.
We have put together cybersecurity best practices for every organization. We urge you to read the document and live by it.
This is more good news for companies looking to protect themselves from the phishing and ransomware scourge!
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