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https://www.wsj.com/articles/abnormal-security-raises-210-million-in-series-c-funding-round-11652180400


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 * Pro Cyber News


ABNORMAL SECURITY RAISES $210 MILLION IN SERIES C FUNDING ROUND


FOUR-YEAR-OLD COMPANY IS NOW VALUED AT $4 BILLION AS EMAIL SECURITY TAKES CENTER
STAGE

THE FBI SAYS BUSINESS EMAIL COMPROMISE ACCOUNTED FOR ABOUT $43 BILLION IN
COMPANY LOSSES BETWEEN 2016 AND 2021.

Photo: Yui Mok/Zuma Press
By
James Rundle
May 10, 2022 7:00 am ET

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Email security company Abnormal Security Corp. has raised $210 million in a
Series C funding round led by Insight Partners.

Based in San Francisco, Abnormal uses machine learning and other forms of
artificial intelligence to detect potential cyberattacks launched through
cloud-based email systems such as Microsoft Corp.’s Office 365 or Alphabet
Inc.’s Gmail. These include targeted and social-engineering attacks and business
email compromise attempts. They also include supply-chain infiltrations, where
hacker emails might not include typical nefarious elements, such as malware
attachments or malicious links.

The company’s funding round also saw participation from venture capital
investors Greylock Partners and Menlo Ventures.

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Chief Executive Evan Reiser, who ran Twitter Inc.’s targeted advertising unit
before starting Abnormal four years ago, said it applies behavioral data science
techniques to build profiles of users. Anomalous activity, such as emailing
through a personal account, changes in tone or language, and other factors are
analyzed to determine whether, for instance, a request to quickly pay an invoice
to a vendor, could be a fraud attempt. Suspicious activity is flagged for
further investigation.



“The real challenge customers have is stopping an attack that no one has seen
before. To do that, obviously, you can’t use your knowledge of prior bad stuff,
so it requires a fundamentally different approach and that was the insight that
caused us to take what we built in the ad world and move that into
cybersecurity,” Mr. Reiser said.

Abnormal’s funding round, which brings the company’s valuation to around $4
billion, will primarily be used to further develop the company’s technology, Mr.
Reiser said. It will also fuel international expansion, particularly into
regions that require a local presence because of data-residency and sovereignty
laws.

The funding comes as cybercrime involving email reaches all-time highs. The
Federal Bureau of Investigation said that business email compromise accounted
for around $43 billion in company losses between 2016 and 2021, a number that
experts say is likely to be conservative because of underreporting of incidents.

Cyberattacks such as ransomware and other malware use email as an entry point
for wider access to company systems, often relying on bulk phishing attempts to
get users to click on links or open payloads. Security chiefs, however, say they
have seen an uptick in more sophisticated attack attempts in recent years, which
are often tailored to the target and can be difficult to identify as fraudulent.

“Any traditional email security gateway can detect spam, phishing and all those
things, but we started seeing very low volume, but extremely high-risk attacks
coming through,” said Gopal Padinjaruveetil, chief information security officer
at automotive insurer Auto Club Group-AAA. “These were specifically targeted
attacks for financial crime,” he said.

The rise in these attacks coincided with work-from-home orders as a result of
the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Padinjaruveetil said, creating widespread
vulnerabilities as stressed and distracted employees sometimes struggled to
maintain security awareness.

“They just need one person to click on that link and download the malware, and
then everything can go sideways,” he said. Auto Club Group deployed Abnormal as
an extra line of defense in its email security program, operating alongside
built-in security from its email provider and an additional security vendor
acting as a gateway.

Jorel Van Os, CISO at insurance broker Acrisure LLC, said that the application
of Abnormal’s artificial intelligence allows him to not only detect attacks that
would otherwise pass by traditional email security platforms, but also examine
the hundreds of data points that are analyzed to reach a decision that an email
is suspicious.

Such features used to be nice to have, but increasingly, commercial pressures
are forcing companies to demonstrate that they are going beyond basic email
protections. Insurance carriers, for instance, are now asking what potential
insureds are doing in addition to the basic protections they receive from
Microsoft and Google, Mr. Van Os said.

“Cybersecurity liability insurance applications have changed dramatically
because there’s been so many losses in the last few years from those. So you’re
seeing that evolve very, very quickly,” he said.

Write to James Rundle at james.rundle@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8



Appeared in the May 16, 2022, print edition as 'E-Security Firm Taps Funds.'




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