To summarize the lengthy introduction concisely: it’s common knowledge that phishing attempts are increasing in both scale and complexity, AI is empowering more elaborate attacks that bypass conventional defenses, and the ongoing scarcity of cybersecurity professionals means that maintaining fully-staffed security teams is a challenge for everyone.
Given this situation, security teams must efficiently and effectively monitor and respond to threats. While it’s crucial not to overlook legitimate threats, it’s also important to prevent wasting time on false alarms.
In this article, we’ll explore various ways in which Material Security‘s distinctive email security and data protection strategy can significantly improve your security team’s productivity while enhancing the efficacy of your security measures.
Determining Your Alert Allocation
Prior to delving into the specifics, let’s consider the criticality of efficiency in security operations. Reflect on the number of alerts that your security and incident response teams can realistically manage, investigate, and address each day. Just as your department has a financial budget dictating expenditures on personnel and tools, your security teams have limitations on the time available for responding to threats daily. This is known as your alert allocation.
This figure will vary consistently depending on factors like the severity and complexity of incidents, the volume of strategic projects demanding attention, and various other influences. Nonetheless, there is a threshold. Just as it’s unwise to squander financial resources on redundant tools or valueless software, it’s equally imprudent for your teams to exhaust their alert budget on redundant alerts, repeatedly addressing the same issue, or pursuing false positives.
The efficiency with which your security team manages their alert allocation is as vital as financial management, if not more so. Let’s now explore how we contribute to enhancing this efficiency.
Striking a Balance Between Precision and Sensitivity
Regardless of the volume of alerts received by your team, there’s a limited timeframe within which they can address them each day. Material’s phishing approach hinges on maximizing our customers’ time. Our alerts should catch a substantial number of threats and minimize false positives.
While terms like “precision” and “recall” are common in data science, they might not immediately resonate with security professionals. In the context of email detection, precision gauges the proportion of flagged emails that are genuinely malicious, while recall assesses how many actual malicious emails the system detects.
An efficient security system minimizes false positives (high precision) while capturing most threats (high recall). There’s a tradeoff between the two: reducing sensitivity can cut false positives but might miss true positives, while elevating sensitivity can catch more true positives at the cost of increased false positives.
Our focus at Material is on a detection mechanism that effectively balances these aspects and emphasizes vital malicious messages. Given today’s intricate threat landscape, no single protective layer suffices, and no lone detection method attains the optimum equilibrium. Hence, the Material Detection Engine comprises four core elements:
- Material Detections: We meld machine learning tactics with rules crafted by our expert threat research team. While AI and ML adeptly connect dots and identify relationships that may elude humans, human expertise still outshines AI in insight and skill. Material Detections encapsulate the best of both worlds.
- Custom Detections: Recognizing that every organization and setting is distinct, we enable clients to create custom detections tailored to their user base or external observations.
- Email Provider Alerts: Regular alerts from Google and Microsoft concerning post-delivery phishing attempts are assessed by us and integrated into our detections.
- User Reports: Material automates the abuse mailbox, processing user reports, consolidating similar messages, deploying automated protection promptly, and offering adaptable remediation paths for security teams.
Collectively, these aspects form a potent and exceptionally accurate detection platform providing clients robust protection without inundating them with false alarms—achieving the desired balance between precision and recall. While maintaining accuracy and sensitivity equilibrium is vital, it’s insufficient; a contemporary email security system must also streamline security operations.
Avoiding Redundancy and Enhancing Focus
Notably, there’s a surge in highly personalized email attack campaigns widespread today. Discussions abound concerning the degree of generative AI’s involvement–the prevailing assumptionThe explosion of generative AI was expected to provide adversaries with a new array of tools to utilize. However, research such as the Verizon 2024 DBIR indicates minimal impact on attacks and breaches currently.
These attacks, whether AI-generated or otherwise, are undeniably increasing. Despite still receiving generic and transparent ‘are you available?‘ messages from supposed “CEOs” upon joining a new company, there is a rise in emails containing fraudulent invoices from domains mimicking trusted partners or vendors. Additionally, sophisticated pretexting attacks are crafting highly believable narratives from seemingly familiar senders. Such attacks often come from spoofed or homoglyph domains, which can easily deceive even the most cautious users.
These attacks are often replicated across an organization, yet personalized for each recipient. They manage to bypass native email security measures and breach SEGs, appearing as distinct attacks. Subject lines, senders, and body content can vary between each email, complicating the ability to group them together efficiently–thus requiring security teams to invest multiple cycles into investigating and addressing dozens or even hundreds of versions of the same attack.
Material provides support to security and IR teams in addressing this issue by automatically grouping suspicious messages. Upon identifying a potential threat, Material automatically generates a Case within its platform. It then scans the entire environment for messages that match the case based on various criteria, such as matching senders, subject lines, body text, and even URLs embedded within the messages and attachments, enabling the grouping of otherwise ungroupable attacks.
 |
| Material creates cases for all detected messages, and clusters similar messages together, simplifying investigation and remediation. |
By consolidating messages within a single case, triaging, investigating, and remediating become significantly more streamlined. Speedbumps are automatically applied to all messages within the case by default–alerting users of potential malicious content before the team conducts an investigation. Upon investigating and applying a remedy to one message within the case, all messages within the case, including those matched post-investigation, receive the same remedial action.
Anecdotal evidence from a Material customer exemplifies the tangible benefits observed in the real world. By collaborating with Material Security, their SOC saved over 300 hours in a three-month period on investigating and responding to phishing emails, freeing up time for more critical matters within their operational scope.
Leveraging Your Organization’s Collective Insight
The current workforce is well-informed about phishing threats. Though the possibility of falling for such threats still exists, individuals are more cautious towards suspicious, poorly articulated, or unexpectedly arriving messages.
Precision in response is crucial. While AI and machine detections have made remarkable progress, the observant eye of an employee remains irreplaceable in identifying emails that raise suspicion.
However, managing user reporting can become a significant burden for your security team if not handled efficiently. Dealing with duplicate reports, harmless emails flagged erroneously for review, and responding to the reporting users can cumulatively drain significant time across numerous reports each day.
 |
| Material automates the full lifecycle of user report response, applying immediate herd immunity to all messages within a reported message case across your entire organization. |
Material streamlines the backend management of user reporting, automating your abuse mailbox to hasten remediation and save your security team valuable time. It automatically adds a speedbump to reported messages across all user accounts, offering immediate protection while the security team delves into the matter.
With detailed remediation options, your teams can choose to speedbump, block links, or delete reported emails confirmed to be malicious. Through case consolidation and message matching, responding to one email translates to responding to all similar emails within the entire case. Furthermore, Material automatically sends acknowledgments to reporters which can be customized throughout the investigation.
Material streamlines and simplifies the process of managing and responding to user reports while incorporating immediate protection for investigations.
Reliable Advanced Protection, Operational Efficiency Guaranteed
Your security teams are already inundated with tasks. Material Security reduces the occurrence of false alarms, expedites triage and investigation of phishing incidents, and minimizes time spent on administrative tasks related to user reporting. By freeing up more of your alert budget, Material enables you to allocate resources where they are most needed.
To gauge the time-saving potential for your security team, get in touch with us for a demo today.
About Author
