Tessian was named the Best Cybersecurity Service at the HMF European Hedge Fund Services Awards, in light of our innovative work to secure the human layer and prevent data breaches in hedge funds. Hosted at the Natural History Museum, the spectacular awards ceremony celebrated hedge fund service providers that have demonstrated exceptional client service, innovative product development and strong and sustainable business growth over the past 12 months. Tessian was shortlisted along with six other cybersecurity comapnies that provide solutions to protect hedge funds from cyber attacks.

We were thrilled to be rewarded by the judges – a panel of leading hedge fund COOs, CFOs, GCs and CTOs – as the best-in-class cybersecurity solution for this industry. The award recognized how Tessian has fundamentally changed the way hedge funds approach cybersecurity – focusing on protecting the human layer, rather than just securing a company’s networks and devices. This is incredibly important because 86% of data breaches can be attributed to human error, whether that’s accidentally sending an email containing sensitive data to the wrong person or falling victim to a phishing attack. When you consider that 60% of the organizations hit with phishing attacks during Q4 of 2017 were financial institutions, the threat in this particular industry is not one to be ignored. By using machine learning to analyze historical email data – the leading indicator of human behavior in the enterprise – our technology can automatically understand relationships, context and communication patterns of people. By understanding normal communication, we can automatically identify and prevent email threats before they occur.  

Email still remains the main communication channel for enterprises. Despite its incredible efficiencies and economies of scale, email as a communication tool is reliant on human interaction and judgement. This makes human error particularly prevalent on email. One example of a mistake that can occur over email due to human error is an email being directed to the wrong person. A misdirected email might happen for any number of reasons, just a few of which include stress, alertness, being in a hurry or simply bad luck. For example, staff members at a major Australian bank mistakenly sent emails that contained data from over 10,000 customers to the wrong recipient due to an error that changed the email’s domain name. Over the past few years the workforce has become more mobile, meaning that more data now exits organizations’ premises and networks. Many employees manage their inbox on the move, replying to an urgent email after work while commuting or messaging international clients in the early hours of the morning. While this flexibility is advantageous for employees and businesses, different diligence levels outside working hours and on mobile devices raise the chance of a misdirected email being sent. Let’s take a small-scale example. Even for a small organization where each employee sends a moderate number of emails per day, Tessian data shows that the likelihood of a misdirected email leaving the organization in a given month is high. That risk increases dramatically with the size of an organization. No matter how many Secure Email Gateways and firewalls you employ, failing to address this risk could mean your organization’s data being compromised. Mistakes due to human error are not limited only to outbound email. Over the past few years, inbound attacks such as spear phishing have become more frequent and more sophisticated. For example, someone may receive an email from an attacker impersonating a supplier requesting a transfer for an outstanding payment. The degree of urgency included in the email and the fact that the attacker utilizes a legitimate relationship makes the likelihood of the recipient falling for the attack more likely. In order to stay vigilant in this changing environment, security officers and business leaders should focus on two simple questions: 1. What’s the most likely cause of data loss for our organization? 2. What’s the maximum damage that a human error could cause? This awareness can help security leaders gain a better understanding of the risks they need to manage on an ongoing basis. Ultimately, this awareness could help mitigate the likelihood of data loss, and associated consequences like financial penalties or reputational damage. Mistakes due to human error are inevitable, but the negative consequences are not. Tessian’s machine-intelligent email filters use machine learning to understand relationships and behaviors on email, identifying in real time when people are about to make a mistake – whether it’s entering the wrong reply-to address or potentially falling for a spear phishing attack. Thoughtful, intelligent notifications located within the email client stop the threat before it can cause damage to your organization. Take action against misdirected emails and spear phishing today.  

I’m delighted to officially share with the world today that Tessian’s raised $42m in Series B funding led by Sequoia and partner Matt Miller is joining the board. I got to properly know Sequoia and Matt last year after a destiny-crafting introduction from the legendary CyLon. We’ve been fortunate to have a lot of interest from investors, but I try not to take meetings unless we’re actually fundraising. Sequoia was different. Instead of spending time talking about ARR and our metrics, Matt was interested in our vision, founding story, team and challenges. Sequoia call themselves company-builders, and that’s exactly how it felt from day one. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Matt to the Tessian board and to work with him to create a new category of enterprise cybersecurity. When Tom, Ed and I started Tessian in our apartment in 2013, we started with a grand vision but laser focus on trying to execute one thing extremely well—preventing sensitive data loss caused by human error. Over the past three years, we’ve been quietly expanding the capabilities of our machine learning engine to address other gaping holes in enterprise security. Today, we’re also delighted to share our vision with the world for the very first Human Layer Security platform for the enterprise. Enterprises have spent the past two decades protecting their networks with firewalls, their devices with endpoint security but have completely neglected the most important data processors of all—their people. The new capital raised in our Series B will allow us to leverage the technology we’ve applied to email security and expand this to provide automatic protection for the myriad platforms and applications in use everyday by people in global organizations. Of course, none of this would have been possible without our most important allies. First, I’d like to thank all of our customers for their incredible support and belief in us over the years. Cybersecurity, by definition, is a risk-averse industry. It’s been inspiring to see how many enterprises are willing to adopt new technology to solve their greatest problems. Second, and to whom we owe the greatest thanks—the employees of Tessian. It’s because of your brilliance, creativity and relentless grit that we’ve achieved what we have today. As I’m sure any founder will attest, fundraising is a necessary part of company building but not the ultimate goal. We now have a huge amount of work ahead as we execute against our plans for 2019—a year that’s shaping up to be our biggest yet.

  Introducing Defender Business Email Compromise scams were responsible for over $5.3 billion in global losses from 2013 to 2017. According to the FBI, these types of attacks are also becoming more prolific, jumping 2,370% from 2015 to 2016 alone. Most enterprises have anti-spam and anti-phishing filters in place to protect their emails. Unfortunately, bad actors are outpacing these safeguards and are finding more intelligent ways to break through to their targets. This is where Tessian comes in. Since 2013, we have been developing machine intelligent technology to prevent threats that rule-based legacy gateways and platforms cannot. Tessian Defender is our latest advancement. Defender protects from threats executed by humans rather than just code, using the Tessian’s Parallax Engine and natural language processing technology to keep the most sensitive data and systems private and secure. The Problem Spear phishing is effective because of its highly targeted approach. When it successfully dupes individuals into sending money, sharing data, or downloading malware, it brings significant reputational and monetary risk. Defender protects against these threats through comprehensive safeguards against weak and strong-form impersonation alike. Weak-form impersonation can generally be detected and prevented through the rule-based controls that many enterprises already use. Often this is done by authenticating SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to estimate the legitimacy of the sender. This entails cross-referencing IP addresses, scouring for invisible signatures, and linking senders to their domain names and broader email protocols. Rule-based defences also perform checks to find matches with known display names, modifications to “reply-to” addresses, and newly registered domains. Unfortunately, this is not enough. These systems are limited in scope and not always implemented. DMARC authentication, for example, only protects a domain against direct impersonation, where a bad actor is trying to spoof someone’s actual email address. It fails to address domain or display name lookalike impersonation. Furthermore, global DMARC adoption rates are low. Legacy technology stacks find it difficult to query large datasets in real-time, which means it is often a challenge for systems to quickly recognise and filter phishing emails. Even where these systems are sufficient, weak-form spear phishing is now evolving into a more advanced threat: strong-form spear phishing. This type of spear phishing subverts legacy email security systems by turning to tactics that are difficult for humans and rule-based email security processes to detect. Traditional, pre-defined rule sets cannot fend off strong-form spear phishing because of the almost infinite number of domain and sub-domain, display name and address, and freemail permutations impersonation allows for. Even where they do detect certain impersonations, legacy systems cannot capture the evolving dynamics of email networks, with enterprises developing new relationships every day over email. A rule set would need to constantly be updated in order to remain effective. This is time consuming and resource intensive and inefficient. The Solution Tessian Defender is specifically designed to tackle strong-form impersonation spear phishing. Due to the complexity of strong-form impersonation techniques, having an understanding of email relationships based on historical data and user behavior is critical. Using stateful machine intelligence, Tessian has developed a new approach to thwart spear phishing. Tessian’s Parallax Engine can predict for this user, at this point in time, does this email look like a security threat? Tessian Defender also uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand content within an email and will automatically classify its intent, so it can provide more context to the end user within a warning message, and also highlight the specific risk to security teams.  

Organizations often focus their security efforts on threats from outside. But increasingly, it’s people inside the organization who cause data breaches. There was a 47% increase in Insider Threat incidents between 2018 and 2020, including via malicious data exfiltration and accidental data loss. And the comprehensive Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report suggests that Insiders are directly responsible for around 22% of security incidents. So, what is an insider threat and how can organizations protect themselves from their own people?

Importantly, there are two distinct types of insider threats, and understanding different motives and methods of exfiltration is key for detection and prevention. Types of Insider Threats The Malicious Insider

Malicious Insiders knowingly and intentionally steal data, money, or other assets. For example, an employee or contractor exfiltrating intellectual property, personal information, or financial information for personal gain. What’s in it for the insider? It depends.   Financial Incentives   Data is extremely valuable.Malicious insiders can sell customer’s information on the dark web. There’s a huge market for personal information—research suggests you can steal a person’s identity for around $1,010.   Malicious Insiders can steal leads, intellectual property, or other confidential information for their own financial gain—causing serious damage to an organization in the process.   Competitive Edge Malicious Insiders can steal company data to get a competitive edge in a new venture. This is more common than you might think. For example, a General Electric employee was imprisoned in 2020 for stealing thousands of proprietary files for use in a rival business. Unsurprisingly, stealing data to gain a competitive edge is most common in competitive industries, like finance and entertainment.   The Negligent (or Unaware) Insider 

Negligent Insiders are just “average” employees doing their jobs. Unfortunately, “to err is human”… which means people can—and do—make mistakes.   Sending a misdirected email   Sending an email to the wrong person is one of the most common ways a negligent insider can lose control of company data. Indeed, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office reports misdirected emails as the number one cause of data breaches.    And according to Tessian platform data, organizations with over 1,000 employees send around 800 misdirected emails every year. We’ve put together 11 Examples of Data Breaches Caused By Misdirected Emails if you want to see how bad this type of Insider Threat can get.   Phishing attacks   Last year, 66% of organizations worldwide experienced spear phishing attacks. Like all social engineering attacks, phishing involves tricking a person into clicking a link, downloading malware, or taking some other action to compromise a company’s security.   A successful phishing attack requires an employee to fall for it. And practically any of your employees could fall for a sophisticated spear phishing attack.Want to know more about this type of Negligent Insider threat? Read Who Are the Most Likely Targets of Spear Phishing Attacks?   Physical data loss    Whether it’s a phone, laptop, or a paper file, losing devices or hard-copy data can constitute a data breach.Indeed, in June 2021, a member of the public top-secret British military documents in a “soggy heap” behind a bus stop.   Looking for more examples of Insider Threats (both malicious and negligent?) Check out this article: 17 Real-World Examples of Insider Threats   How can I protect against Insider Threats?   As we’ve seen, common Insider Threats are common. So why is so hard to prevent them? Detecting and preventing Insider Threats is such a challenge because it requires full visibility over your data—including who has access to it.   This means fully mapping your company’s data, finding all entry and exit points, and identifying all the employees, contractors, and third parties who have access to it. From there, it comes down to training, monitoring, and security.   Training   While security awareness training isn’t the only measure you need to take to improve security, it is important. Security awareness training can help you work towards legal compliance, build threat awareness, and foster a security culture among your employees. Looking for resources to help train your employees? Check out this blog with a shareable PDF.   Monitoring   Insider Threats can be difficult to detect because insiders normally leverage their legitimate access to data. That’s why it’s important to monitor data for signs of potentially suspicious activity.   Telltale signs of an insider threat include: Large data or file transfers Multiple failed logins (or other unusual login activity) Incorrect software access requests Machine’s take over Abuse by Service Accounts Email Security The vast majority of data exfiltration attempts, accidental data loss incidents, and phishing attacks take place via email. Therefore, the best action you can take to prevent insider threats is to implement an email security solution.   Tessian is a machine learning-powered email security solution that uses anomaly detection, behavioral analysis, and natural language processing to detect data loss.   Tessian Enforcer detects data exfiltration attempts and non-compliant emails Tessian Guardian detects misdirected emails and misattached files Tessian Defender detects and prevents spear phishing attacks How does Tessian detect and prevent Insider Threats? Tessian’s machine learning algorithms analyze your company’s email data. The software learns every employee’s normal communication patterns and maps their trusted email relationships — both inside and outside your organization. Tessian inspects the content and metadata of inbound emails for any signals suggestive of phishing—like suspicious payloads, geophysical locations, IP addresses, email clients—or data exfiltration—like anomalous attachments, content, or sending patterns. Once it detects a threat, Tessian alerts employees and administrators with clear, concise, contextual warnings that reinforce security awareness training