Mimecast adds new capabilities to cloud platform

Mimecast Limited has announced it has added new capabilities to its cloud-based platform comprised of integrated service components that organisations need to combat the latest cybersecurity challenges. These capabilities further enable customers to embrace a new approach to defending email. Mimecast’s Email Security 3.0 strategy helps organisations address threats at three distinct zones: the email perimeter, inside the organisation or network and beyond the perimeter. Mimecast has incorporated new major platform innovations helping to increase efficacy with technology integrations and product capabilities, including web browser isolation, security awareness training integrations and brand exploitation protection solutions.

“The email threat landscape has changed and requires organisations to evolve from a perimeter-based discipline to a more pervasive one. For instance, tactics, like impersonation attempts, are becoming increasingly more difficult to identify as they’re happening both in email and ‘in the wild’, but organisations still need to cover off on their basic protection needs at the same time. This requires organisations to consider a new strategy when it comes to defending email,” said Peter Bauer, Chief Executive Officer at Mimecast. “As our customers’ needs evolve, Mimecast is committed to continuing to develop new innovations into our platform to help them build a stronger cybersecurity and resilience posture.”

New enhancements to Mimecast’s cloud-based platform include:

Zone 1 – At the Email Perimeter: Now Includes Browser Isolation and Custom Security Block for added protection  

Mimecast Browser Isolation for Email is designed to provide organisations an additional layer of protection from new phishing sites, appearing as recently as the last few hours. Mimecast Browser Isolation is engineered to mitigate the risk of emails containing links to spoofed sites by preventing a direct connection between the user’s browser on his or her device and the target web page. Users are now further protected from any potentially malicious action like the challenge of credential harvesting or malicious downloads as the browsing session is executed and contained within the Mimecast cloud rather than on the user’s device.

Browser Isolation policies can be enforced for all employees or customised to target higher risk employees as desired. The service is built to provide a safe environment for security analysts and messaging administrators to investigate incidents, helping reduce time to respond, contain and remediate threats.

The new Custom Security Block capability is designed to enable customers to ingest security data from other sources into Mimecast’s platform to enhance efficacy further for their organisation. Often security-mature organisations face the challenge where they have large amounts of security data from point solutions across their cyber ecosystems and third-party feeds. Unfortunately, much of that data is not actionable if not properly utilised to improve detection in other parts of their environment. Mimecast’s cloud-native, multi-tenant platform with API connectors to a host of third-party cybersecurity vendor solutions addresses this problem by helping organisations maximise the return on their current investments in threat intelligence sources by utilising them in Mimecast.

Zone 2 – Inside the Perimeter: Security Awareness Training is integrated into the Mimecast Platform to reduce costs and complexity

Recent research reveals that 98% of organisations deploy security awareness training to their employees, yet 71% of organisations have been hit by an attack where malicious activity was spread from one user to another. To help organisations more effectively manage security awareness training, Mimecast Awareness Training is now fully integrated into Mimecast’s cloud-based platform. This integration is designed to enable customers to more easily administer awareness training into their Mimecast and broader security ecosystem.

Customers can now reduce the cost and complexity by having all their Mimecast solutions fully-integrated, making it easy for organisations to deploy, manage and maintain their security awareness training investments from a single administration console.

Zone 3 – Beyond the Email Perimeter: Brand and Domain Protection with Machine Learning advances phishing protection from known and unknown attacks

Cybercriminals consistently exploit human weaknesses by impersonating an organisation to dupe their customers, supply chain and even their own employees. Spoofed websites and domains, where an attacker forges a website or email to make it look as though their communication has come from a trusted source, is a common tactic used in phishing campaigns and business email compromise, the use of which grew by 54% and 67% respectively.

Mimecast Brand Exploit Protect is engineered to deliver an innovative solution covering more than 99% of phishing use cases across the web. Using machine learning, it is designed to run targeted scans that identify even unknown attack patterns, blocking compromised assets before they become live attacks at the earliest preparation stages.

Additionally, Mimecast now enables customers to stop spoofing attacks faster with a self-service email channel analysis and DMARC reporting. To further strengthen brand efficacy, Mimecast DMARC Analyzer is built to extend protection from impersonation attacks by helping to detect and block attackers using domains an organisation owns that are being used to spoof customers and other external parties, as well as employees.