When it comes to cyber-resilience, a one size approach does not fit all. The threat level is rising as attacks become more frequent and complex. Cyber criminals use multiple attack vectors to gain the intelligence and access necessary to penetrate a company’s defenses. In particular, sophisticated, targeted email attacks that are aimed at specific employees are one of the most...

Your email is about to get safer if you are a Gmail user! This week in the Gmail Blog, Product Manager John Rae-Grant talked about a couple of changes to Gmail on the web that will allow users to see if an email might not be as secure as it should be. First, Gmail will display a broken lock symbol in the upper right of the email window if it is not encrypted in transit with TLS...

What would you do if you received a confidential email from your CEO asking you to wire money to an attorney as part of an acquisition? This is what happened to Texas manufacturing firm, Ameriforge Group Inc., whose director of accounting wired $480,000 to the Agricultural Bank of China, before realizing that it was an email scam. Unfortunately, these kinds of highly targeted...

Lately, the question of DANE vs DMARC has been coming up quite a bit. While both DANE and DMARC involve “authentication”, there are significantly different things meant by each. Let’s start by addressing the underlying technologies. DANE, or RFC6698, is intended to mitigate the threat of a man-in-the-middle intercepting encrypted communications by posing as one of the end...

In the last five years, we’ve all become far too familiar with it – hackers spoofing a company’s domain and therefore tarnishing the brand, bad actors attempting to infect our computers with malware, and criminals sending millions of spam messages. As if this isn’t enough, now there is a whole group of people working to outsmart companies AND their customers by using cousin...

With the high volume of email activity the holiday season brings, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about holiday email scams – what to look for and how to avoid them. So in the spirit of giving…some good advice…our Field CTO John Wilson has published a blog on LinkedIn with suggestions that can help people better protect themselves from online criminals, and help...

Snowflakes and Early Automation EffortsAt Agari, as part of our mission to solve phishing, we deal with data at scale. We’ve chosen AWS to help us move quickly, making sure our infrastructure is as agile as we are.Unfortunately, in the beginning, we treated AWS instances much the same way as physical servers: each configuration was lovingly hand-crafted, packages were installed...

Steve Katz - “Phishing and social engineering is still a global threat to every business around today.”Last year, phishing attacks cost organizations $4.5 billion in losses, but as we all know the loss is not only monetary. These attacks exploit the trust we as customers have in the brands we use.Recently Agari sat down with the Financial Services industry's first CISO,...

 At Agari, we are vocal about the steps organizations can take to protect their brands and customers from the impact of phishing attacks. But what exactly are the hard numbers behind our mission? Let’s look at some phishing statistics showing a clear need for change when it comes to mitigating the phishing problem.A rising threatVerizon research has found that phishing is now...

A long-time sponsor of FS-ISAC, Agari takes pride in being a member of the digital security community, committed to protecting financial services brands and their customers from email-based cyber attacks. During this year's conference, held at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, we once again joined our industry brethren, reconnected with familiar faces and forged new...

[et_pb_section admin_label="section"][et_pb_row admin_label="row"][et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text" background_layout="light" text_orientation="left" use_border_color="off" border_color="#ffffff" border_style="solid"] In the final installment in our series of blogs on the Fundamentals of Phishing  we will explore how to prevent phishing attacks. To truly...

In the second in our series of blogs on the Fundamentals of Phishing we will explore how to identify fraudulent emails. Not that long ago, phishing attempts were quite primitive and often full of errors, and it was easier for consumers to identify when something was amiss. In addition, consumers weren’t accessing their inboxes from multiple devices and mobiles, nor did they...

I first heard about the Ashley Madison breach on July 15, 2015 in a post by Brian Krebs. I immediately wondered what the fallout of such a breach would be. Would Ashley Madison's new tagline be "1 million divorces and counting!" Would the perpetrators try to profit from the stolen data, perhaps through blackmail? I never imagined I'd soon have the chance to explore the dataset...

Threat intelligence exchange will benefit Agari and RiskIQ customers through heightened security awareness and the ability to respond to discovered threatsSAN MATEO, Calif. — Sept. 15, 2015 — Agari, the leading provider of data-driven security solutions that detect and prevent advanced email cyberthreats, and RiskIQ, the Enterprise Digital Footprint Security company, today...

Workflow Schedulers Workflow schedulers are systems that are responsibile for the periodic execution of workflows in a reliable and scalable manner. Workflow schedulers are pervasive - for instance, any company that has a data warehouse, a specialized database typically used for reporting, uses a workflow scheduler to coordinate nightly data loads into the data warehouse. Of...

With the X-Files soon making a return to the small screen (!!!), I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of trust. Specifically as it relates to security, and especially the concept of "Zero-Trust". Many security front-runners have begun enacting a new security architecture called Zero-Trust Networking and it really took off when Google decided to implement it....

Data science applications provide much of the power behind Agari’s e-mail security products. The e-mail landscape is vast and dynamic, and we require the ability to regularly analyze incoming data. Models including forwarder classification, malicious campaign identification, domain reputation, and inbound sender modeling are created on hourly to daily cadences. We therefore...

MotivationAmong the challenges that our engineering team faces is the ability to classify an email-sending entity as a forwarder. At Agari, we are primarily interested in the authentication of emails from originating senders. Forwarders are defined as entities which forward messages from originating senders as well as from other forwarders. Examples include servers in...

Agari's mission to solve email phishing often presents unique technical challenges. Our data ingestion process involves coping with large-scale inbound SMTP traffic. We've chosen Postfix as our MTA of choice. The traditional way to scale SMTP is simply to maintain MX records for multiple ingestion paths. This works but can be very limiting. Agari's Amazon Web Services-hosted...