Phishing Detection and Response: What You Need to Know

What is Phishing Detection and Response? 

In today’s digital world, the strength of an organization’s cybersecurity posture directly influences its resilience against disruptions. Phishing Detection and Response (PDR) is a critical component of this defensive matrix––it involves identifying, assessing, and neutralizing malicious or suspicious activities within email systems as quickly as possible.  

Why Prioritize PDR? 

It’s simple – email is like the front door to your organization and just as you wouldn’t leave your front door wide open, the same is true for securing your email communications. Threat actors exploit emails to deliver many kinds of sophisticated phishing scams. Phishing Detection and Response aims to protect your organization by providing an early warning system and effective countermeasures to mitigate threats. 

How Does PDR Work? 

Understanding the importance of PDR is just the first step; it’s important to know how it functions to highlight how it can help you avoid a costly breach. Cofense® PDR Platform exemplifies the modern approach to email security. It augments your legacy solution, picking up where your secure email gateway (SEG) fails. Many people believe their SEG is protecting them from attacks; however, even though SEGs are an important part of filtering emails, recent statistics show they miss between 30-50% of all email-based attacks.  

Cofense PDR Platform identifies the threats that slip past your SEG by utilizing an unsurpassed intelligence matrix powered by more than 35 million Cofense-trained employees reporting threats worldwide and then responds by quarantining those harmful emails. This automated process limits the time between threat identification and response, reducing the window for potential damage. 

The Phishing Detection and Response process includes the following steps: 

1. Detection – With the help of more than 35M Cofense-trained employees, Cofense PDR ingests thousands of reported emails bypassing SEGs every day. 
2. Investigation – We then enhance that data with information curated from our proprietary intelligence sources, as well as our real and relevant intelligence data from our Phishing Defense Center (PDC). All of that high-fidelity intelligence (99.998% accuracy rate) is used to programmatically analyze and prioritize the threats so that they can be efficiently investigated by your security operations center (SOC) team based on your company’s security protocols. 
3. Quarantine – Every time a malicious email is identified by our Phishing Detection and Response solution, it is immediately quarantined, logged, and shared across the entire Cofense PDR customer base. 
4. Mitigation – Because of this sharing, if a particular threat shows up in a customer’s environment, even if it hasn’t been reported yet in their environment, that customer will have what they need to eradicate that threat before it causes damage. And even more exciting, our Phishing Detection and Response solution has auto-quarantine capabilities that again uses all that intelligence to automatically remove threats from your environment even before they reach the users’ inboxes. 

What Are the Benefits of PDR?

Cofense PDR Platform empowers organizations not only by isolating and neutralizing malevolent emails but also by providing analytics and insights that drive strategy. By arming your organization with our solution, you are adding an extra layer of protection to catch the threats that bypass your SEG before they cause catastrophic consequences.  

The key benefits of Cofense PDR Platform include: 

1. Early threat detection – Identifying email attacks before employees have the chance to engage with them greatly reduces the potential impact of a breach.  
2. Reduced dwell time – The longer it takes to detect a threat increases the chance of the attack causing severe damage. With PDR processes, security teams can quickly identify and remediate threats. 
3. Protection of critical assets – security teams can stop threats before they enable access to your organization’s sensitive data and use it for financial gain or reputation damage. 
4. Cost savings – Detecting threats early increases the likelihood the attempted attack is unsuccessful, safeguarding your organization against ransoms, recovery costs, and lost productivity.  
5. Regulatory compliance – our solution enables organizations to comply with strict data security process requirements of privacy laws.  
6. Elevated security posture – Security teams can gain insight into potential threats, as well as system vulnerabilities. 
7. Enhanced risk management – a cyberattack can wreak havoc on an organization’s reputation and consumer trust. The ability to detect and stop attacks helps to decrease the chance of a newsworthy event.  

So, keep your front door locked and secure, and remember that with the right tools and knowledge, you can confidently navigate the ever-changing landscape of cybersecurity. Don’t let malicious actors breach your defenses – contact us today to learn more about Cofense PDR Platform and how it can help you stay one step ahead with your email security.