Proofpoint, Inc. a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, has announced an expansion of the capabilities of its award-winning platform to provide its customers with more comprehensive and customizable security controls that put people first. These new solutions and integrations protect organizations from inbound threats across messaging, collaboration and social media applications, secure SaaS applications and identity state across a wide range of applications, prevent data loss with intelligent and adaptive data security, and guide employees to behave safely through adaptive security guidance.
These new capabilities, announced at the company’s ‘Protect conference, set a new standard for how organizations manage human risk and leverage two key elements of the patented platform: Proofpoint Nexus, a suite of AI, behavioral and threat detection that identifies and mitigates risk, and Proofpoint Zen, a group of technologies that provide best-in-class, comprehensive protection for people working with email, collaborative applications, the web and data. Together, they provide an integrated and cohesive experience that delivers human-centered protection for both end users and security professionals.
Mastering Copilot for business efficiency
“From ransomware to business email compromise and data breaches, the biggest cyber risks are centered on people and their identities,” said Sumit Dhawan, CEO of Proofpoint. “But human risk is difficult to combat because we all work with email, collaboration applications, the cloud and the Internet, which leads to new threat risks, identity propagation and data exposure. Proofpoint has pioneered human-centric security and we are now redefining it by bringing together previously disparate processes and technologies into a unified platform to protect new digital channels, reduce risk for organizations and better guide users every day in real time.”
Stopping threats
Threats are increasingly using digital channels such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and LinkedIn to launch phishing attacks and trick people into revealing personal information or taking certain actions, such as transferring money or revealing sensitive company data. In the last three years, URL threats via email have increased by 119% and threats via SMS have skyrocketed by 2,524%, according to Proofpoint data.
Powered by industry-leading threat intelligence and Proofpoint’s new ZenWeb browser extension, Proofpoint Collab Protection provides advanced, real-time threat protection to block malicious URLs delivered in any messaging, collaboration or social media application. The solution can be deployed in Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari or any Chromium-based enterprise browser. By using Nexus TI (Threat Intelligence), customers benefit from a collective defense that protects a network of thousands of the world’s most important organizations.
SaaS applications
While enterprise identities allow employees to easily work with Microsoft 365, GenAI, cloud storage and collaboration applications, cybercriminals have also learned to exploit them to launch ransomware attacks, hijack cloud accounts and exfiltrate data.
According to Proofpoint, almost all organizations (96%) have been targeted by cloud account takeover attacks, and more than half have experienced this themselves. In addition, half of all hijacked accounts had multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled. This shows that insecure applications, both company-provided and shadow IT, are a valuable stepping stone for attackers to gain control of corporate cloud accounts.
Proofpoint Nexus maps user identity propagation and common attack paths and detects configuration and access anomalies to prevent unauthorized access and takeover of cloud accounts. This allows security professionals to see where an account stands and whether it poses a risk based on its permissions, the data it is associated with, or its good (or bad) security configuration. Based on the posture and risk of an identity, Proofpoint Posture Management from Proofpoint makes recommendations and performs configurations to improve the posture.
Defend data
Identifying insider threats is difficult and makes internal investigations reactive: cybersecurity administrators focus on high-risk users, such as departing employees, employees on a performance improvement plan or contractors, only after they have been made aware of their potential risk to the organization. With Adaptive Information Protection from Proofpoint, security teams can take a proactive approach to managing insider risk by shifting responsibility from the security analyst creating manual policies to automating responses to a user’s risk behavior. This in turn helps analysts work more efficiently.
As GenAI tools have become commonplace in the workplace for tasks such as summarizing meeting minutes, rewording emails or writing code, there are also careless or unintentional actions that can expose important company information such as personal data, source code and other corporate information. Some of this information is difficult to identify and protect with traditional DLP tools. Proofpoint’s new GenAI Intentional Protection and GenAI Prompt Writing helps organizations enable the use of GenAI while protecting structured and unstructured corporate data from disclosure. It educates end users and guides them through compliance notifications to change behavior when interacting with GenAI tools.
Change behavior
Traditional compliance-based security programs are ineffective when it comes to mitigating human risk and guiding employees toward safer behavior. In fact, research shows that most employees (68%) knowingly engage in risky behaviors, even though 99% of organizations have a security awareness program in place. Proofpoint continues to develop its security awareness solution to help organizations reduce security incidents by driving real behavior change and building a strong security culture.
Proofpoint ZenGuide (formerly Proofpoint Security Awareness Training) enables security teams to automate and scale personalized learning paths based on each individual’s risk profile, behaviors and role. ZenGuide leverages insights into people’s risks across the Proofpoint ecosystem to deliver relevant interventions that promote security and reduce risky behaviors. This allows companies to go beyond compliance-based programs and provide targeted, contextualized training that addresses specific risks and behaviors.
The new capabilities of the Proofpoint platform will be unveiled during Proofpoint’s "Protect" event series, which kicks off today in New York City.
