New IRONSCALES Research Finds Microsoft ATP Takes Up to 250 Days to Create Phishing Attack Signatures

PRESS RELEASE

TEL AVIV & ATLANTA – SEPT 17, 2019 – IRONSCALES, the world’s first automated phishing prevention, detection and response platform, today revealed that Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), the primary email security filtering service for Office 365 users, can take up to 250 days to create an email phishing attack signature and make it available to enterprise technical staff. Over the course of 3 months, a representative sample size of 1000 malicous emails containing links or attachments found that ATP took between 6 and 250 days from the time an email phishing attack was first reported until the time that a signature was deployed. This delay in signature creation leaves Office 365’s 60 million monthly users at severe risk of malicious email phishing messages impacting business continuity - as it now takes less than 82 seconds for a phishing email to lure a click.

“It’s frustrating to learn that ATP seems to lack the sense of urgency that phishing mitigation requires in today’s email threat landscape,” said Eyal Benishti, IRONSCALES founder & CEO. “As the main cybersecurity safeguard for millions of people, ATP must prioritize phishing attack signatures to limit risk or be more transparent with their users about the need for additional email security to serve as an additional line of defense. When combining this slow response time with the fact that ATP cannot stop the onslaught of fake O365 login pages harvesting users credentials, users must begin to ask tough questions about just how much ATP is actually reducing their risk.”

IRONSCALES’ research also found that attackers are gaining unprecedented leverage over their organizational targets. Currently, for every uniquely identified email phishing attack:

·  50% now affect more than 25 organizations worldwide

·  20% now affect more than 40 organizations worldwide

·  10% now affect more than 55 organizations worldwide

·  5% now affect more than 65 organizations worldwide

·  2% now affect more than 100 organizations worldwide 

Additionally, attackers are now targeting between two and 40 mailboxes per company impacted by an email phishing attack, IRONSCALES research also concluded.

How IRONSCALES mailbox-level security “sees” attacks post SEG/ATP

Unlike other anti-phishing technologies, IRONSCALES is installed post gateway, inside of the mailbox. This mailbox-level view provides unprecedented visibility into the emails that bypass secure email gateways (SEG), including insight into the sender’s true identity and the data and metadata extracted from previously trusted communications. As such, IRONSCALES can identify which attacks bypass which SEGs and how long it takes each SEG to create a new signature for each new threat.

IRONSCALES hybrid human intelligence and machine learning solution gives end users and security professionals the right training, tools, and intelligence – all with one-click resolution from a single platform – to hunt, log, alert, analyze, and remediate phishing attacks.

IRONSCALES takes advantage of threat intelligence and decision-making from our global base of users, giving you an entire virtual analyst community for real-time, human-verified, actionable threat intelligence from the world's top security experts and SOCs. The ongoing level and depth of intelligence will enable organizations and users to get ahead of the game against emerging threats.

For more information, download our eBook: Office 365 ATP is Not Built to Defend Against Modern Real-World Email Threats, visit www.ironscales.com and follow @IRONSCALES.

About IRONSCALES  

IRONSCALES is the leader in anti-email phishing technologies. Using a multi-layered and automated approach starting at the mailbox-level to prevent, detect and respond to today’s sophisticated email phishing attacks, IRONSCALES expedites the time from phishing attack discovery to enterprise-wide remediation, reducing the time from detection to response from hours or days to just seconds or minutes, by significantly reducing the workload on incident responders. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, IRONSCALES was founded by a team of security researchers, IT and penetration testing experts, as well as specialists in the field of effective interactive training, in response to the phishing epidemic that today costs companies millions of dollars annually. It was incubated at the 8200 EISP, the top program for cybersecurity ventures, founded by alumni of the Israel Defense Forces’ elite Intelligence Technology unit.