Mimecast unveils AI-powered security upgrades to combat BEC

Security vendor Mimecast has announced artificial intelligence enhancements to its email security and data protection solutions, aimed at tackling sophisticated business email compromise attacks and insider threats.

The company strengthened its Advanced Business Email Compromise Protection platform with natural language processing capabilities to identify deceptive emails that lack traditional markers like malicious links or attachments.

Mimecast's upgrades come as business email compromise continues to represent an estimated 25 per cent of all financially motivated cyber attacks.

The enhanced platform builds social graphs of user interactions and analyses semantic patterns to detect unusual activity that could signal an attack.

It provides administrators with detailed insights into the characteristics that trigger email blocking decisions.

"These new enhancements are a direct result of long-standing and measured integration of this powerful technology into our product suite," Sean Brady, senior vice president of product management at Mimecast said.

Alongside email security improvements, Mimecast announced AI-powered updates to its Incydr data protection solution, designed to better identify sensitive information like credit card details and social security numbers.

The Incydr upgrades include cloud-based content inspection capabilities that can analyse multiple file types, including images, without impacting endpoint performance.

These new features add to Incydr's existing library of more than 250 risk indicators, with administrators gaining the ability to create custom indicators for their organisation's specific intellectual property.

The enhanced email security features are available globally, while the new Incydr capabilities are currently in limited early access with general availability expected in December 2024.

The company said these improvements form part of its broader strategy to help organisations better manage and reduce human-related security risks through its integrated platform approach.