Mimecast Acquires Machine Learning Phishing Security Firm MessageControl

Email and data security company Mimecast has acquired eTorch, a messaging security provider with solutions to help stop social engineering and human identity attacks using machine learning technology.

In a press release, Mimecast said the acquisition of eTorch — which does business as MessageControl — strengthens the company’s email security strategy designed to improve security at the email perimeter, inside the organization and beyond the perimeter.

Mimcast says the combination will provide customers using productivity apps like Microsoft 365 stronger protection against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks and will prevent the inadvertent loss of sensitive and confidential data while serving as an additional sensor to improve Mimecast’s threat intelligence.

A key component of MessageControl’s technology is machine learning that is applied to build al ibrary of known and unkonw patterns for an individual user. Over time, the technology gets more intelligent and can make real-time decisions on more than 1 billion unique user behavior data points.

It also provides real-time warnings in email to help employees make better decisions on opening phony emails and the ability to prevent misaddressed emails to avoid data leaks.

In a statement, Mimecast CEO Peter Bauer suggested the coronavirus pandemic is leading to a surge in cyberattacks.

“The first half of 2020 has been unlike anything we’ve experienced before,” Bauer said. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that better innovation is required to protect against the latest weaponized and unweaponized attacks.”

In the press release, Mimecast included research that found impersonation fraud, phishing and internal threats of data leaks are rising, and IT and security professionals say they’ve seen the volume of each increase by at least 43% each over the last year.

MessageControl’s machine learning can reveal the hidden risks of email communications with real-time warnings to help prevent those increasing attacks.

Bauer called MessageControl a natural complement to Mimecast’s cybersecurity solutions.

“We believe this acquisition allows Mimecast to continue to evolve our Email Security 3.0 strategy and provide the best protection for productivity cloud applications like Microsoft 365,” Bauer said.