Opportunity in Email Security

BEC attacks are the #1 cybercrime

BEC is the #1 cybercrime

Email security may seem like a market in decline. You’ve likely grown up using email and question whether it is still important with the emergence of tools like Slack and Teams. You see large, entrenched competitors, email providers like Microsoft and Google, as well as Secure Email Gateways like Proofpoint and Mimecast, and you wonder if there is innovation in the space.

If you look closer, however, you will realize that email security is a massive market with unsolved customer problems. It is the predominant attack vector- 90% of all cyberattacks start with an email. Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a huge problem for customers; it is the #1 cybercrime, accounting for half of all cybercrime losses, totaling over $26B in the past 3 years. It is not a problem in decline either- losses due to BEC are actually increasing at 100% year over year. More broadly, email remains a dominant communication platform, with roughly 306M emails sent per day from over 3.9B users- everyone uses email.

Shifting threats and technology

Disruption in security markets typically happen when there are shifts in the technology landscape and the threat landscape, and this is what we are seeing. In the past, attacks tended to be mass emails with malicious payloads (e.g. links, attachments) from untrusted parties. Today, attacks are frequently personalized, payload-less, and from trusted vendors.

Users are falling for these attacks. Perhaps you are a CFO and receive an urgent email from the CEO asking to move funds around, and in your haste do not notice that the email was sent from a lookalike domain. Perhaps you work in the Accounts Payable department and receive an email from a vendor asking to change banking details, but you don’t know that the vendor had an account compromise. These new attacks require different approaches for detection.

This shift in the threat landscape is happening at the same time as technological shifts. Computing infrastructure, including email, is moving to the Cloud. Whereas before vendors had to stand up on-prem infrastructure for email security, today vendors can connect to email providers using APIs. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more popular, enabled by better and cheaper computing and storage technologies. In the past, detection was largely done through rule-based approaches that are prone to accuracy issues and cumbersome to configure.

Abnormal Security’s Opportunity

These changes are creating a perfect storm in the email security market. Traditional solutions are not as effective in catching this new wave of advanced BEC attacks. These attacks are a large problem for customers. AI-based techniques are better at catching them. Customers are motivated to retire on-prem infrastructure from legacy solutions.

We at Abnormal Security believe that there is going to be a $10B email security company created in the next 5 years, built with API connections to email providers, Cloud infrastructure, and AI-based detection. We aim to be that company. If this mission resonates with you, check out our careers page.