Email and data security company Mimecast today announced the acquisition of Chicago-based company eTorch Inc.
Doing business under the name MessageControl, eTorch is a messaging security provider with solutions designed to help stop social engineering and human identity attacks with the use of machine learning technology. The company was founded in 2015 and employs 16 people.
Mimecast said the deal was inspired by the "significant increases in spam and phishing attacks" that followed in the wake of the global health pandemic.
According to a recent report from the Boston firm, 60% of organizations have seen the volume of impersonation attacks increase. In addition, the volume of internal threats or data leaks experienced by organizations rose 58% and 43%, respectively.
A company spokesperson said: "To combat these growing threats, Mimecast’s acquisition of MessageControl will provide customers using productivity apps, such as Microsoft 365, even stronger protection against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks with machine learning technologies."
The acquisition will allow Mimecast to offer several key capabilities, including contextual, real-time warnings in email, the ability to prevent misaddressed email data leaks, and machine learning identification of anomalous behaviors.
“MessageControl is a natural complement to Mimecast’s suite of cyber-resilience solutions,” Mimecast CEO Peter Bauer said in a statement.
“Its artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities will offer additional layers of defense by evolving and ‘learning’ the customer environment and user behaviors over time.”
MessageControl’s graph technology has been designed to inspect email attributes and content and then apply machine learning to build a library of known and unknown patterns for each individual user. The technology has been engineered to get smarter over time. Impressively, it has the ability to make real-time decisions on more than one billion unique user behavior data points.
“Mimecast’s portfolio of solutions offers MessageControl the opportunity to expand its reach to protect even more organizations against the advanced threats plaguing the market today,” said Paul Everton, founder and chief technology officer at MessageControl.
“We’re excited to join the Mimecast team as we continue on our mission to stop social engineering and human identity attacks.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.