INKY Technology Corporation, an email protection startup that leverages the power of unique computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI), today announced the release of the company’s 2019 Special Phishing Report, which quantifies just how many phishing emails still breach the leading email protection systems, and examines why identifying and blocking these attacks still poses such a challenge.
A single phishing attack can cost an organization hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. The three upstream Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) examined in this report allowed over 16,000 malicious emails through. Fortunately, INKY wasn’t fooled by any of them, because INKY uses new technologies in novel ways to “see” emails much like the human recipients. Most organizations cannot afford hundreds or even thousands of phishing attacks every year and must be confident in defenses.
“Today’s phishing attacks have increased in sophistication in terms of format and content. Traditional, legacy solutions are unable to detect these nuances, making it impossible for organizations to fend off these attacks,” said Dave Baggett, Co-Founder and CEO of INKY. “As we unraveled the data in this report, it became clear that as an industry we need to rethink our approach to block and tackling phishing attacks using machine learning to weed out the incredible likenesses phishing attacks have today.”
For this report, INKY’s analysis spans a four month period from December 2018 – April 2019 across three distinct customer environments. These three customers run both a legacy SEG and INKY, with INKY as the last line of defense. INKY identified and blocked tens of thousands of verified-malicious emails that passed through the upstream SEGs with no quarantine or markup whatsoever. Furthermore, INKY added user-friendly yellow warning banners to approximately 1% of emails that passed through the legacy SEGs without comment; these were both suspicious emails and known-good emails requiring special guidance or handling such as wire requests.
The report provides examples of specific kinds of emails INKY properly identifies that escape detection by legacy SEGs. A key insight is that INKY’s novel computer vision, anomaly detection, and HTML rendering algorithms allow INKY to get much closer to what and end user will see than other systems; this makes INKY impervious to entire classes of attacks that work against legacy SEGs such as zero font, hidden text, and HTML-replay brand forgeries.
