Armorblox
Bringing Textual Understanding to Security with NLU

“The CFO is emailing the CEO from his personal gmail account to request a check? It could be a BEC attack!” says DJ Sampath, Co-founder, and CEO of Armorblox. His remarks should be understood in a context where attacks that mimic human interactions among other sophisticated tradecrafts are increasingly becoming harder to detect. Despite all of the cyber security tools that are in place, securing data and IT assets is a formidable challenge that all organizations share irrespective of their size. The crux of the matter is no amount of firewalls, antimalware tools, spam filters, and methods like sandboxing address the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain – humans. According to Sampath, it is easy for hackers to get past security solutions by targeting employees as they communicate, causing the majority of cyber attacks.

Most employees working in an organization communicate and collaborate by exchanging emails, documents, chat messages, and other methods. Hackers target these communications platforms and documents by exploiting basic human behavior along with social engineering and phishing. Armorblox has built an elegant solution that can analyze and process the textual data in communications, enabling companies secure the human layer of cybersecurity. The CEO continues “Armorblox has built the world’s first security platform that fully leverages the spectrum of AI to secure the human layer based on Natural Language Understanding (NLU).”

Signature-based antimalware tools are obsolete and unsustainable, as the prevailing model for threat hunting involves detection of threats, by collecting the sample, and reverse engineering it. Moreover, traditional security solutions are unable to process and reason with the textual communications of employees intelligently, in real time. Additionally, the fragmented and compartmentalized solutions for cloud security and products to control network traffic make cybersecurity more complex. They neither integrate nor communicate and add to the plight, generating false positives. “Securing the human layer of data security involves fundamentally rethinking enterprise security as email continues to be the single biggest attack vector, responsible for 96% of all attacks,” explains Sampath.

Armorblox’s approach of cybersecurity enables organizations to replace one-time security gates with context-aware, adaptable, programmable security. Powered by AI and augmented by NLU, the platform continuously identifies, monitors and prioritizes risk both proactively and reactively. Moreover, the platform is enhanced by advanced analytics and automation to accelerate time-to-detect, respond, and scale.

Armorblox has built the world’s first security platform that fully leverages the spectrum of AI to secure the human layer based on Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

The platform analyzes the content, sentiment, and tone of emails sent across different stakeholders of an enterprise; be that an email sent to an individual who is outside of the organization or anyone who is working inside. The company also employs its holistic approach to prevent accidental data disclosures. This approach allows organizations to make sure that the right information is shared with the right person. The technology identifies phishing, spear phishing, and social engineering attacks, to name just a few.

Content management and workflow automation tools are part and parcel of almost all enterprises. As employees share confidential documents and communicate through different platforms, it is essential that the data is protected. To this end, Armorblox’s platform secures the textual communication and data shared between employees, customers, and stakeholders, such as business partners. One of their unique value propositions is that Armorblox can complete the customer onboarding process in 15 minutes. The firm’s dedicated cybersecurity professionals connect to the client’s infrastructure through APIs and initiates an inspection.

The company also helps clients automatically create and adopt policies concerning data sharing and usage, sending the alerts to the relevant groups. For example, for an employee about to accidentally share an attachment with someone’s personal information, the alert can be sent directly to the employee to verify their action. This mitigates the issue of forwarding every security issue to the information security team when someone senses a threat.

Although Armorblox is less than two years old, their platform hit a home run during the initial phase of its inception. With a mission to mitigate the threat humans pose as the weakest link in the security chain, Armorblox puts forth a practical method that can actively identify and avoid emerging threats.