Longline Phishing Infographic: How Industrial-scale Phishing Attacks Work

In conjunction with last week's Infosecurity Europe 2013 show, our UK team put together this really cool infographic that explains how a new class of industrial-scale phishing attacks -- which Proofpoint recently dubbed "longline phishing" attacks -- work, along with tips for avoiding such attacks.

To learn more about this new class of phishing attacks, check out our longer form report, Longline Phishing: Email-borne Threats, Cloud Computing, Big Data, and the Rise of Industrial Phishing Attacks.

Click the infographic image below to view it full size!

Phishing Statistics 2013: New Proofpoint Report on "Longline" Phishing Attacks

In conjunction with our exhibit at the 2013 RSA Security conference, Proofpoint published a new report today that describes a new class of phishing attacks that the company has dubbed "Longline" phishing attacks.

Longlining, which is named after the industrial fishing practice of deploying miles-long fishing lines with thousands of individual hooks, combines successful spear phishing tactics with mass customization. Using these techniques, attackers are now able to rapidly deploy thousands of unique, malware laden messages that are largely undetectable to traditional signature and reputation-based security systems.

Worse, despite their scale, these mass customized phish were effective enough to trick more than 10 percent of recipients into clicking on malicious content capable of taking complete control of PCs and compromising corporate networks.

Proofpoint was able to trace and defeat these attacks for enterprises using Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection™, the company's recently introduced, big data protection solution. Download our new paper, Longline Phishing: Email-borne Threats, Cloud Computing, Big Data, and the Rise of Industrial Phishing Attacks to learn more about this new class of attacks, including:

• The unique characteristics of longline phishing attacks

• How those characteristics make longlining attacks extremely difficult for traditional email and perimeter security systems to detect and block

• Details about how these attacks are carried out

• Data about the alarming effectiveness of longline phishing attacks

And if you're at the RSA Conference this week, come visit us at booth 739 -- take our annual security survey and we'll give you one of our limited edition t-shirts (as usual, they are pretty cool for vendor swag).

Some Customer Insights on Improving eDiscovery Process Efficiency in the Cloud

In light of next week’s Legal Tech 2013 event in New York (stop by and see Proofpoint at booth 2607), we wanted to recap some of the really terrific insights from our recent web seminar on eDiscovery process efficiency.

In that webinar (see, "Improving eDiscovery Efficiency in a Cloud-based World"), our special guest speaker,  Jonathan Rudolph, attorney for medical device manufacturer C. R. Bard,  raised some very interesting points that might be useful for those heading to Legal Tech next week.

Jonathan was a key part of the team that selected and deployed Proofpoint Enterprise Archive at C. R. Bard and has a unique role in that he serves as both the eDiscovery manager within the IT organization, as well as an attorney within the legal department for this global manufacturer and marketer of medical products, based in New Jersey.

His role as IT-legal liason makes him uniquely qualified to discuss the challenges faced by organizations attempting to improve discovery processes, as well as offer best practices to get past common obstacles. Some of the key points he highlighted:

• eDiscovery remains a matter of perspective, with organizations struggling without a common vocabulary and shared priorities. This gap is made more challenging by the fact that it limits the ability to create a shared view of the problem, which then contributes to a set of common priorities across IT and legal teams. Judges, however, remain above the internal fray and bring unpredictable knowledge (and comfort) of how, when, and where technology and eDiscovery processes intersect.
• For some, today’s processes for identifying and collecting email for discovery can be like a rat maze. He notes that some archiving solutions even return different sets of search results for the same query at different times, leading to completely unpredictable (and clearly incomplete) discovery results. This type of problem not only consumes IT resources, but entails significant organizational risk and can result in multi-million dollar costs to have outside counsel filter through "junk" results.  There are no shortage of recent court rulings that highlight the potential impact (e.g., Samsung v. Apple, Hynix v. Rambus) and costs of "discovery gone wrong."
• Many organizations cannot “break the monkey machine”. In his remarks, Jonathan refers to unbending organizational processes as "the monkey machine." The monkey machine has always done things a specific way, and has embedded that into the company's organizational culture and fabric. To "break the monkey machine," Jonthan argues that it's imperative to involve both the legal and IT departments  from the outset, and that it's helpful to have an individual who can “speak both languages.” Further, it's critical to be able to quantify savings delivered by any technology-enabled eDiscovery process improvement.
• The goal of defensibility is a myth:  Defensibility as a goal often leads to reactivity – which provides a poor starting point and places the burden of persuasion with you, not your adversary. Companies are better served in moving toward a position of justifiability in order to better dictate the rules of the game.
• Security in the cloud is an internal obstacle – that can be overcome. It is inevitable that IT will continue to look for opportunities to cut costs by moving to the cloud. Legal teams - who are often reluctant to embrace cloud-based approaches to eDiscovery - can be persuaded by showing them the advantages of strong service level agreements (SLAs) and security features (such as Proofpoint’s DoubleBlind Key Architecture) which leave data access and control decisions in the hands of legal decision makers – not cloud service administrators.

Using Proofpoint Enterprise Archive, Jonathan and the team at C. R. Bard have already realized the benefits of automating critical, early-stage discovery tasks. After using the system for 4 large matters, he is happy to report that the solution delivers as advertised and has already proven its ability to provide cost reduction and enable greater process efficiency.

To hear all of Jonathan's insights, watch the replay of "Improving eDiscovery Efficiency in a Cloud-based World."

And if you're in NY for Legal Tech next week, please stop by and meet us at booth 2607!

Proofpoint Winter 2013 Release Introduces Proofpoint Secure Share: Secure, Managed File Transfer for the Enterprise

In a press release issued today, Proofpoint announced its Winter 2013 release, which includes updates to our entire suite of cloud-based enterprise security and compliance solutions. One of the highlights of the latest release is a new cloud solution for securely transferring large or sensitive files, Proofpoint Secure Share.

Proofpoint Secure Share provides enhanced security and administrative control over traditional file transfer methods, existing on-premises solutions, and public cloud file sharing services. It leverages the advanced data loss prevention features of Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy to automatically enforce DLP rules such as blocking or encrypting sensitive content.

For a quick overview of the capabilities of Proofpoint Secure Share, including the end-user experience, administrative interface and data loss prevention features, check out this brief video demonstration:

In addition to the new secure file transfer capabilities, the Winter 2013 release includes enhancements across our cloud-based threat protection (Proofpoint Enterprise Protection, Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection), archiving (Proofpoint Enterprise Archive), and governance (Proofpoint Enterprise Archive Content Collection option) solutions.

In our next live web seminar, File Sharing: Getting Data Control Without Frustrating Your Enterprise Users, we'll be taking a closer look at Proofpoint Secure Share and the issues involved in enabling business users to share large files in an easy, secure and compliant way.

Gartner 2012 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving: Proofpoint One of Three Leaders

New for December 2012, industry analyst firm Gartner has published its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving. This report provides a detailed overview of the Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) market and evaluates he key vendors based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute.

In the new report, Proofpoint is one of only three vendors positioned as Leaders.

As usual, Proofpoint has licensed a reprint of the new EIA magic quadrant and you can read the full report, compliments of Proofpoint, at the following URL:

http://www.proofpoint.com/email-archiving-magic-quadrant

Writing in the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving, Gartner analysts Sheila Childs, Kenneth Chin, Debra Logan and Alan Dayley note that, "The EIA market is healthy and growing rapidly. EIA has emerged as a commonly used technology underpinning for higher-level use cases supporting information governance, e-discovery, historical preservation of data and application retirement."

In addition to a comparison of the various archiving vendors and their solutions, the report also highlights several key trends in the enterprise information archiving market, including:

Increasing adoption of cloud-based archiving: The analysts write, "Archiving as a service (aka cloud archiving) has rapidly surpassed on-premises archiving as the preferred deployment model for most organizations."

Growing importance of information governance as an important business driver: Gartner says, "Broader information governance concerns (regulatory compliance, business-focused retention and deletion of data, and managing aging data based on a clear understanding of its value) are beginning to surpass e-discovery as the primary driver for deploying EIA."

In-place management of legal holds is also highlighted as an important feature: Gartner says, "Another trend that is emerging as an offshoot of an organization's desire to better manage its archiving and e-discovery processes is in-place legal hold. This functionality offers the ability to identify data wherever it resides and either apply legal holds to the data without moving it to an archive or to move it to a temporary archive at that point."

There's a lot more terrific information about today's enterprise archiving market in this report. To read it now, follow the link above, or simply complete the mini form, below:

About the Magic Quadrant graphic:

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Proofpoint, Inc. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Aon Corporation Video Case Study: Simplifying Archiving and eDiscovery in the Cloud with Proofpoint

We had the chance recently to speak with Rob Franch, Senior Director for Unified Collaboration & Communications at Aon Corporation about his company's use of the Proofpoint Enterprise Archive cloud-based archiving solution. Aon Corporation is a Fortune 500 provider of risk, reinsurance and human resources services.

In this video case study, Rob discusses the business issues that led Aon to standardize on Proofpoint Enterprise Archive to email and other information produced by more than 60,000 employees across 120 countries worldwide. The deployment of Proofpoint was part of Aon's transition from Lotus Notes to hosted Microsoft Exchange and, in the process, Rob and his team greatly streamlined Aon's archiving infrastructure — replacing a variety of legacy systems including IBM Common Store and Symantec Enterprise Vault.

In addition to describing how Aon solved its archiving and eDiscovery challenges, Rob also discusses regulatory compliance, supervision, the partnership between Proofpoint and Microsoft, and his enterprise's ongoing relationship with Proofpoint.

My thanks, once again, to Rob for taking the time to share his story with us and to Aon Corporation for allowing us to share it with you!