Looking back at the last 12 months, Tessian’s Human Layer Security platform has scanned nearly 5 billion emails, identified over half a million malicious emails, stopped close to 30,000 account takeover attempts, and prevented over 100,000 data breaches due to a misdirected email…

At the same time, we rolled out a number of important product updates to help keep our customers safe. Here are the most important product updates to Tessian’s Human Layer Security platform from 2021.

We built world’s first Intelligent Data Loss Prevention Engine

We believe that the next generation of Data Loss Prevention is fundamentally about shifting away from entirely rule-based techniques towards a dynamic, behavioral approach. That’s why we built Guardian and Enforcer, to automatically prevent both accidental data loss and sensitive data exfiltration to unauthorized accounts. 

But we have also seen that, when combined with dynamic behavioral analysis, custom DLP policies, play an important role in an organization’s data security strategy.

With the launch of Tessian Architect in October 2021, enterprises can now deploy powerful, intelligent DLP policies. Architect is a perfect complement to Tessian Guardian and Enforcer and provides the market’s best-in-class Email DLP platform:

1. Architect was built together with leading security teams – it’s intuitive, quick-to-learn and comes with a library of prebuilt policies
2. Architect has built-in machine learning capabilities and features a powerful logic engine to address even the most complex DLP use cases
3. Architect is designed to educate users about data security practices in-the-moment and guide people towards better behavior

Want to learn more about Tessian Architect? Read more about it here.

We now protect customers from compromised external counterparties

This year, we saw a record number of bad actors compromising email accounts of trusted external senders (suppliers, customers, and other third-parties) to breach a target company. These attacks are canned external Account Takeovers (ATO), and they’re one of the main pathways to Business Email Compromise (BEC).

Because these malicious emails don’t just appear to have come from a trusted vendor or supplier’s legitimate email address, but actually do come from it, external ATOs are incredibly hard to spot, meaning organizations are exceptionally vulnerable to them. 

Tessian Defender now automatically detects and stops external Account Takeover attacks. 

By using machine learning to understand a sender’s normal email sending patterns (like where they usually send from, what they talk about, what services they use, and more), it can identify suspicious deviations from the norm and detect malicious emails. 

When this happens, Defender can either block these attacks, or show educational alerts to end-users, helping them identify and self-triage attacks.

Learn more about External Account Takeover protection here.

We now stop more threats, with better accuracy, with less admin overhead

In-the-moment warnings are one of the features that set Tessian apart from the competition. When Tessian Defender detects a potentially malicious email, it warns users with a pop-up, explaining exactly why the email was flagged.

But, we know that sometimes, it’s better to automatically block phishing emails.

Tessian Defender now automatically blocks attacks, before they reach a user’s mailbox. This gives security teams an  additional layer of email security, preventing end-users from receiving emails that are highly likely to be phishing attacks. 

Defender can also adapt the response it takes to remediate a threat. If our machine learning is close to certain an email is malicious, it can quarantine it. Otherwise, it can deliver it to the end-user with an educational warning. This adaptive approach is so powerful because it strikes a balance between disrupting end-users and protecting them.

Finally, this year, Tessian Defender’s detection algorithm made some big strides. In particular, improvements in our risk confidence model allowed us to reduce false positives by significantly providing a better experience to end-users and security teams.

We now stop employees from accidentally sending the wrong attachment

Accidental data loss is the number one security incident reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and sending an incorrect attachment is part of that problem. In fact, 1 in 5 external emails contain an attachment, and research shows nearly half (48%) of employees have attached the wrong file to an email. 

• 42% of documents sent in error contained company research and data
• 39% contained security information like passwords and passcodes
• 38% contained financial information and client information. 
• 36% of mistakenly attached documents contained employee data

Thanks to an upgrade to Tessian Guardian, organizations can now prevent employees from accidentally sending the wrong attachment in an email. 

The upgrade uses historical learning, deep content inspection, natural language processing (NPL), and heuristics to detect counterparty anomalies, name anomalies, context anomalies, and file type anomalies to understand whether an employee is attaching the correct file or not. If a misattached file is detected, the sender is immediately alerted to the error before the email is sent. This is completely automated, requiring no overhead from IT teams.

Best of all, the warnings are helpful, and flag rates are extremely low. This means employees can do their jobs without security getting in the way.

Learn more about misattached file protection here.

We can now quantify and measure human layer risk

Comprehensive visibility into employee risk is one of the biggest challenges security leaders face. With the Tessian Human Layer Risk Hub, our customers can now deeply understand their organization’s security posture, with granular visibility into employee risk, and insights into their risk levels and drivers.

How does it work? Tessian creates risk profiles for each employee, modelled from a range of signals like email usage patterns, indirect risk indicators, and employee security decisions (both historic and in real-time). Because of this unique data modelling, Tessian can gauge employees’ risk level, including whether or not they’re careful, careless, frequently attacked, and more.

This offers organizations protection, training, and risk analytics all in one platform, providing a clear picture of risk and the tools needed to reduce it.

Learn more about the Human Layer Risk Hub here.

We now integrate with KnowBe4, Sumo Logic, Okta, and more…

Tessian is even more powerful when integrated with other security solutions that help address the risk posed by employees. That’s why, in the last 12 months, we’ve announced exciting integrations with Okta, Sumo Logic, and KnowBe4, each with their own unique benefits for joint customers.

With Sumo Logic + Tessian, security and risk team can understand their risk through out-of-the-box monitoring and analytics capabilities.

With Okta + Tessian, security and risk management teams geet granular visibility into their organization’s riskiest and most at-risk employees and consequently enable them to deploy policies that can help protect particular groups of users from threats like advanced spear phishing and account compromise and prevent accidental data leaks.

And with KnowBe4 + Tessian, security and risk management teams get more visibility into phishing risk than ever before.

Want to help us solve more challenges across use cases? Come build with us.