Email Security & Protection , Fraud Management & Cybercrime , Video

From Email to Human Behavior: Abnormal Security's Evolution

Abnormal Security has broadened its scope from email protection to human behavior defense to address emerging threats around social engineering and fraud.

See Also: OnDemand | 2024 Phishing Insights: What 11.9 Million User Behaviors Reveal About Your Risk

Although email remains the most common initial access vector, co-founder and CEO Evan Reiser said Abnormal is seeing account takeovers and anomalous activity targeting collaboration tools including Slack and Microsoft Teams and CRM products such as Salesforce. Abnormal's ability to analyze behavioral norms stops both malicious emails and account takeover attempts and provides monitoring of application use (see: Abnormal Snags Exabeam, Forescout CEO Mike DeCesare as Prez).

"The core of our platform is understanding human behavior. We need to understand human behavior better than humans and use that to protect people," he said. "By understanding the behavioral norms of who people talk to, what time of day they work, what apps they use, and what business processes they run, that helps us identity malicious emails coming in and provide continuous monitoring of usage."

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Reiser also discussed:

• The role of artificial intelligence in detecting and preventing account takeover;
• New capabilities for monitoring SaaS applications and cloud infrastructure;
• The impact of AI technologies on offensive and defensive cyber strategies.

Prior to co-founding Abnormal in 2018, Reiser led the product management and machine learning teams for the advertising business at Twitter. He has also co-founded several companies, including Bloomspot - acquired by JPMorgan Chase - and AdStack - acquired by TellApart. Reiser began his career at Eastman Kodak doing research and development in machine learning for intelligence applications.