Predictive technology is the use of machine learning to calculate with confidence a future event, thereby empowering organizations to proactively prepare for trending email phishing attacks.
In fact, threat prediction can help businesses use data to prepare for what the next attack will look like and augment it to make it actionable, so to proactively prevent similar or trending attacks from infiltrating or repeat attacks from occurring.
The use of predictive technology may be new to email security, yet it is not new to the broader cybersecurity industry. In fact, leading endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms have utilized machine learning and AI to predict malware for the past several years.
For email specifically, predictive technology must be based on real-time decisions done by real human experts on a minutely basis. For busy security and SOC teams, the capacity to predict future events with a high-level of certainty is a potential resource savior, as many in security roles are overworked and overwhelmed with a growing number of investigations into suspicious emails.
As cyber-criminals constantly exploit email vulnerabilities and create new attack methods, organizations must process threat data as quickly as possible. Propelled by machine learning, predictive technology can cluster similar instances of an attack across an entire organization. This can save hundreds of hours of work by turning multiple permutations into a single incident, offering the ability to quarantine that incident across the entire organization.
Clustering also prevents repeat attacks from being delivered, saving time in identifying other threats and reducing possible damage. In this instance, based on the prior patterns of exploits, you can cluster these similarities in attacks to stop repeat or similar looking attacks instantly.
Predictive technologies can also supplement network-driven data with actual human behavior and insight. Combining the two can enable SOC and security teams to create a historical portrait of how a phishing attack might look and how to alert employees before they fall for the bait.
It’s a more forward-looking and proactive approach to detect anomalies and identify patterns in real-time to identify where an organization’s weak points are and where attackers may strike next.
Organizations that only try to detect based on yesterday’s attacks will remain at great risk. In our whack-a-mole security environment, predicting the next attack is the only way to stay ahead of the disruption that comes with any successful email security incident.