Here’s an introduction to FUDdy: We all know that phishing attacks are growing in scale and sophistication, that artificial intelligence is enabling more sophisticated attacks that evade traditional defenses, and the never-ending shortage of cybersecurity talent means we’re all struggling , to provide a full complement of security teams.
Given this reality, security teams must be able to monitor and respond to threats effectively and efficiently. Obviously, you can’t let real threats go unnoticed, but you also can’t afford to waste time on false positives.
In this post, we’ll look at some of the ways Material securityA unique approach to email security and data protection can significantly—and quantifiably—save your security team hours each week while increasing the effectiveness of your security program.
What is your alert budget?
Before we dive into the “how”, let’s take a moment to review why efficiency is critical in security operations. To do this, let’s consider how many alerts your security and incident response services can realistically triage, investigate and respond to on a given day. Just as your department has a budget that limits the amount of money you can spend on people and tools, your security teams have a limit on the amount of time they can spend responding to threats on any given day. This is your alert budget.
This number will vary from day to day, of course, depending on the severity and complexity of the incidents that arise, the number of critical strategic projects your team is working on, and many other factors. But there is a limit. And just as you can’t afford to waste your limited financial resources on redundant tools or software that doesn’t add any value to your team, you can’t afford to let your teams waste their alert budget investigating repeated alerts, fixing one after another same problem and or look for false positives.
The efficiency with which your security team spends its alerting budget is just as important, if not more so, than how you spend your money. Now let’s dive into how we help improve that efficiency.
Balancing accuracy and sensitivity
No matter how many alerts your team receives, there are a limited number of hours in any given day that your team can devote to responding to them. Material approach to phishing was built on the philosophy that we should help our customers make the most of their time. The alerts we create should detect as many threats as possible while also generating as few false positives as possible.
“Precision” and “recall” are terms that will be familiar to data professionals, but may not immediately ring bells for security officers. In the context of email detection, precision is a measure of how many emails flagged as malicious are actually malicious, while recall is a measure of how many emails actually received are flagged by the system.
A security system that produces very few false positives has high accuracy, and a system that catches almost every threat it sees has high recall. At some granular level, there is some trade-off between the two: as you can imagine, you can reduce the number of false positives you create by reducing the sensitivity of the detections: but reducing the sensitivity often results in true positives being missed, because well. Conversely, you can minimize these missed true positives by increasing the sensitivity, but this will result in more false positives.
Material’s focus has been on creating a detection engine that effectively balances the two and detects the malicious messages you really need to focus on. In today’s increasingly complex threat environment, no single layer of protection is sufficient, and no single detection method can strike the right balance on its own. To this end, the material detection mechanism consists of four key components:
- Detection of materials: Combining machine learning techniques with rules created by our dedicated threat research team. AI and ML are great for connecting the dots and finding connections that humans might miss, but despite all the recent advances in AI, there’s still no way to replace the insight and ability of human experience. Material detection is the best of both worlds.
- Custom detections: Every organization and every environment is unique, so we empower customers to create custom detections based on what you see in your user base or in the wild.
- Email Provider Alerts: Google and Microsoft periodically issue warnings about phishing emails they detect after delivery; we receive and process these alerts and add them to our detections.
- User reports: Material automates your inbox abusefrom receiving user reports, consolidating similar reports into a single case, and immediately applying automated protection while providing flexible remediation flows for security teams.
All of these aspects combine into a powerful and incredibly accurate detection platform that gives our customers powerful protection without wasting time on false positives and noise, delivering what we believe is the right balance between accuracy and recall. But while an effective balance of accuracy and sensitivity is critical, it’s not enough: a modern email security platform must also streamline security operations themselves.
Fool me twice, shame on you
There has been a noticeable rise in email attack campaigns that are not just broad, but highly personalized. The extent to which this can be attributed to generative artificial intelligence is debated. The prevailing view was that the explosion of generative artificial intelligence would give adversaries a new set of tools to play with, but studies like Verizon’s 2024 DBIR at the moment do not show a significant impact on attacks and hacks.
Whether these attacks are generated by artificial intelligence or not, it cannot be denied that they are on the rise. Of course, we all still get generic and transparent”are you available?’ messages from our “CEOs” when we first join a new company. But we also receive emails with fake invoices coming from domains that are fakes or clones of trusted partners and suppliers. We see sophisticated attacks with pretexts that tell completely plausible stories from senders who appear to have ties to us. We receive emails from fake or homoglyph domains that mislead even the most conscientious user.
And often these attacks are replicated within the organization, but with each recipient in mind. Not only do they evade email’s native security controls and pass through the SEG, but they also look like separate attacks. The subject, senders, and even the underlying content can vary from email to email, making it difficult to easily group them together, meaning your security team must go through multiple cycles to investigate and respond to dozens or hundreds of iterations of the same attack. .
The material helps security services and IR teams solve this problem by automatically clustering suspicious messages. When Material detects a potential threat, it automatically creates a Case on our platform. It then scans the entire environment for messages matching that register based on a number of criteria. Of course, it looks for similarities among the usual fields: match senders, match subject lines, match body text, etc. But it also looks for things like URLs embedded in messages and attachments, matching attacks that cannot otherwise be grouped by other means.
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| The tool creates cases for all detected messages and groups similar messages together, simplifying investigation and remediation. |
And when messages are grouped into a single case, it greatly simplifies triage, investigation, and even remediation. Default horizontal shelves apply to everything messages in the event – so your users will be alerted that a message may be malicious before your team can even investigate. And after you’ve investigated and applied a fix to one message in a case, every message in that case—even related messages delivered after your investigation—will receive the same fix.
We’ve already seen great examples of how this is helping our customers in the real world. One of Material’s customers recently told us that they had been tracking their phishing email investigation for three months. In those 90 days, with the help of Material Security, their SOC saved over 300 hours of time investigating and responding to phishing emails. All those hours remained in their budget to attend to other pressing matters.
Harnessing the collective intelligence of your organization
Modern employees are well aware of the threats of phishing. Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t still fall for them, but it does mean they’re on the lookout for suspicious, poorly worded, or just plain unexpected messages.
And it is important that it is correct. No single line of defense will be able to catch all incoming email threats, and despite all the incredible advances in artificial intelligence and machine detection, sometimes there’s no substitute for an astute employee spotting an email that just doesn’t pass muster. sniffing
The downside is that processing user reports can also become a major chore for your security team if not handled properly. Duplicate reports, innocuous emails flagged for review, having to respond to the flagging user(s)… when you add up the minutes, all of these activities require more than dozens or hundreds of reports each day, which can be time-consuming.
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| Material automates the complete lifecycle of a response to a user report by applying immediate collective immunity to all reports in a reported case across your organization. |
Material eliminates the daily backend process of user messages, automating your abuse mailbox to speed remediation and save your security team time. Material automatically adds a lien strike to reported messages across your user base, providing an immediate layer of protection while your security team investigates the issue.
Detailed remediation options allow your teams to increase speed, block links, or outright delete emails that are found to be malicious. And thanks to case consolidation and matching of similar messages, when you research and respond to one email, you’ve responded to all similar messages in the entire case. Finally, Material automatically responds to reporters with a confirmation message, which you can change or update as the investigation progresses if you wish.
The material simplifies and streamlines the process of receiving and responding to user messages while adding immediate protection to provide air cover for investigations.
Enhanced protection you can trust, efficiency you can bank
Your security services have enough to juggle. With material security, they will look for far fewer false positives, triage and investigate phishing cases faster, and spend less time on administrative work with user reports. Content frees up more of your alert budget so you can spend it on what really matters.
To find out how much time you can give back to the security team, Contact us for a demo today.
