Email Security

The Top 9 Anti Impersonation And Spoofing Solutions

90% of all data breaches stem from impersonation or spoofing based phishing attacks. Explore the best solutions for tackling these threats.

The Top 9 Anti Impersonation And Spoofing Solutions include:

Email phishing continues to be one of the biggest threats to the security for companies worldwide. Phishing activities – ransomware in particular – are among the top threats to both public and private sectors. This is due both to its prevalence and ability to hit hard when successful and means that safeguarding against phishing attacks is now a crucial component when it comes to maintaining a strong security posture.

Impersonation and spoofing are the two main forms of phishing attacks aimed at employees. While the two terms seem interchangeable, they refer to very similar but fundamentally different methods of attack. If it tricks a computer, it’s a spoofing attack. If it tricks a human, it’s an impersonation attack.

To aid in the search for a solution to help tackle this threat we have put together a list of our top picks for an anti-impersonation and spoofing solution. These choices each offer their own distinct features and capabilities and have been examined based on our own technical assessments and customer feedback.

It should be noted that not every vendor on this list offers a single consolidated solution that tackles both issues. More often, vendors will have two separate products that can be deployed together, or some vendors only offer products that target one or the other.

Headquartered in Atlanta, USA, IRONSCALES is the industry’s fastest growing cloud-based email security company. Their AI-driven email security solution, IRONSCALES Email Security Platform, stops particularly advanced threats such as business email compromise (BEC), VIP impersonation, and account takeover (ATO) attempts that slip past existing secure email gateways.

IRONSCALES Email Security Platform

  • Artificial intelligence learns how users interact and use email in order to catch spoofing and impersonation attempts–including external communications by performing a 90 day scan on inbox activity
  • AI can also detect instances of phishing
  • Users can send potentially harmful received emails by clicking the IRONSCALES Report Phishing button and sending the email for external review
  • Utilities artificial and human intelligence to rule out attacks from both perspectives
  • Mobile app allows admins to triage alerts and notifications while remote
  • Awareness training

Pricing: IRONSCALES offer companies three tiers of pricing, each with a different range of capabilities that are detailed on their website. There is a Starter™ plan (free version) for up to 500 mailboxes, that includes their full-featured phishing simulation testing functionality and basic email security capabilities; the Email Protect™ plan ($6.00 per mailbox, per month) that adds comprehensive automated email security to what’s included in Starter™; and finally, the Complete Protect™ plan ($8.33 per mailbox, per month), that includes all features of the previous two plans plus Account Takeover protection, Microsoft Teams protection, and unlimited Security Awareness Training. Volume discount pricing is available for Email Protect™ and Complete Protect™ plans. Volume Discount Pricing is available via a quotation request.

Expert Insights Comments: Drawing on the power of artificial intelligence and correlated threat intel from thousands of customer security teams across the globe, IRONSCALES’ emails security solution is overtly robust and effective in preventing a wide range of attacks, including the most sophisticated of attacks, such as anti impersonation and spoofing by removing it from user inboxes before they can interact or respond. It is fast to deploy and configure, with simplified management. Overall, the solution is easy to use for both admins and users alike, with little to no training needed for staff and admins able to navigate through a clean console. We would recommend IRONSCALES for organizations ranging from SMBs to enterprise level.

Abnormal Security Logo

From San Francisco, USA, comes Abnormal: an advanced specialist in email security founded in just 2018. Inbound Email Protection from Abnormal is a powerful cloud-based email security solution that focuses on preventing inbound and internal threats through an array of tactics, most notably by deploying behavioral AI to tackle these threats. 

It’s a comprehensive solution that can securely and effectively block all types of email attacks including malware, ransomware, spoof-based phishing, impersonation attacks, and more. It also has strong filtering for spam and graymail. It’s adept in detecting and quarantining zero-day attacks, as well as ensuring proper email hygiene across the board. It’s an easily deployable solution, with the program up and running in a short span of time.

Abnormal Inbound Email Protection Features

  • Behavioral analysis through machine learning to identify abnormalities and potential threats
  • Builds digital profiles on all employees within the networking, noting department, level, title, communicate, tone, and how they interact with others
  • Risk assessment
  • Abnormalities flagged with admins for inspection
  • Banners to notify users of potential risks when responding to emails
  • Pricing: Pricing is supplied via a quotation request.

Expert Insights Comments: Abnormal Inbound Email Protection solution is a highly intelligent and adaptive tool that leverages AI to learn how your users interact with other users, both inside the network and out of it. This creates an entirely unique algorithm that can detect when something is amiss or not like usual forms of communication, allowing for instances of business email compromise, account takeover, and impersonation to be blocked. It is also adept in blocking out technical based methods of phishing, such as spoofing. All emails are subject to content analysis, meaning that regular phishing instances and fraudulent emails are also ruled out. It is quick to deploy and has easy integration with Microsoft 365. Abnormal Inbound Email Protection is suitable for most industries, ranging from SMBs to enterprise level.

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PhishTitan

PhishTitan, developed by TitanHQ, is a cutting-edge solution for phishing protection and remediation, which integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365. Its primary focus is on catching and resolving advanced, zero-day phishing attacks that may otherwise be missed, mitigating potential risk. PhishTitan uses a proprietary machine-learning algorithm, resulting in detailed and accurate phishing threat detection and post-delivery remediation.

PhishTitan Features:

  • AI Driven Analysis
  • Post Delivery Remediation instantly removes harmful emails from user’s inboxes
  • URL analysis identifies any links that redirect to malicious websites
  • Time of Click Protection blocks access to dangerous sites
  • Banner Notifications alert users to suspicious emails, fostering a better understanding of the threat landscape
  • M365 Integration

Expert Insights’ Comments:

This solution performs a multi-layered analysis including textual analysis, link analysis, and attachment scanning, utilizing machine learning models to detect phishing threats in emails. PhishTitan also performs URL analysis, identifying any links that redirect to malicious websites. PhishTitan is a robust and efficient tool for phishing detection and remediation with distinctive features such as Post Delivery Remediation and native M365 integration. It is an excellent choice for organizations looking for extensive and effortless phishing protection in their Microsoft 365 environment.

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Avanan Logo

Avanan, a Check Point company, has established itself as a trusted and capable figure in the email security market since its inception in 2014. Their contribution to this list is the solid and intuitive Avanan Email Security solution which offers powerful protection for user inboxes, warding off standard and advanced threats. Deployment is cloud-based via API, making it straightforward, fast, and intuitive to complete, as well as capable of being up and running in a matter of minutes. This solution integrates well with cloud-based email servers and does not impact MX records.

Avanan Email Security Features

  • API integrations allow for email history analysis to develop profiles on email communications between individuals and teams
  • Develops understanding of contact lists, users, and departments
  • Anti-phishing feature examines all inbound, outbound, and internal mail for any potential phishing scams – closely looking at sender ID, IPs, language, tone, attachments, and links
  • Malware sandboxing for all mail, file shares, and collaboration apps, such as Teams and Slack
  • Advanced logging, analytics, and policy controls

Pricing: For companies with under 500 employees, pricing plans begin at $3.60 per user per month, and up to $6.00 per user per month for a more expansive plan. For companies exceeding 500, pricing is supplied upon request.

Expert Insights’ Comments: Organizations looking for a smart and adaptive email security solution with additional helpful features can stand to benefit from deploying Avanan Email Security. It offers fast-actioned and robust security at the email gateway and to other communication channels like Slack. It wards inboxes from spoofing, impersonation, malicious attachments, phishing, malware, and more. It is an easy to deploy solution, though with a slight learning curve for configurations. We would recommend Avanan to any organization using a cloud-hosted email server, such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

Barracuda Logo

Barracuda is a highly respected vendor with powerful solutions in the email security space. Their Barracuda Email Protection product is a comprehensive email gateway solution that has spoofing and impersonation targeting capabilities. It combines an email getaway with direct API integration that is easy to integrate with Office 365. It uses AI-based threat detection, allowing for the detection and response to potential impersonation and spoofing based threats in real-time.

Barracuda Email Protection Features

  • Artificial intelligence recognizes and quarantines phishing emails that use impersonation tactics by picking up on the use of deceptive characters, zero-day links, and misspelled domains
  • Granular policy controls for admins
  • Robust filtering capabilities provide virus scanning, spam scoring and real time analysis
  • Archiving and Continuity features offered as an add-on
  • Full integration with Office 365
  • Data loss prevention through outbound filtering

Pricing: Barracuda provides a questionnaire on their site to estimate the cost of implementing Barracuda Email Protection, based on the organization’s requirements and size.

Expert Insights’ Comments: Barracuda Email Protection is an artificial intelligence-powered tool that offers full protection for your email communications, both inbound, outbound, and internal. It is feature rich, with additional add-ons to offer a full email security stack that prevents users from accessing anything malicious directly. It leverages AI that learns how your organization operates and communicates. From there, it is able to identify unusual behavior in email communications and can block and quarantine accordingly, preventing risks such as spear-phishing attacks. Alongside social engineering threats, Barracuda’s Email Protection’s email gateway constantly scans and blocks for any spoofing-based threats. It also offers training solutions to teach users about potential risks and send simulations to test their knowledge. We would recommend this solution to organizations of all sizes who use Office 365 software.

Cisco Logo

Headquartered in San Jose, California, Cisco, is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is a comprehensive email security solution designed to safeguard inboxes and organizations from a variety of threats, including phishing, business email compromise, malware, and ransomware. The solution utilizes advanced threat analysis to detect malicious techniques used in attacks and categorizes threats to provide insights into vulnerable areas within an organization.

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Features

  • Threat intelligence from Cisco Talos aids in detecting and blocking threats
  • Use Secure Endpoint and Secure Malware Analytics to combat advanced threats
  • Gain full visibility into all inbound, outbound, and internal messages
  • Leverage fast API-driven remediation of malicious messages
  • Uses an integrated dashboard for searching, reporting and tracking, which also provides conversation view and message trajectory

Pricing

Pricing for Secure Email Threat Defense is on a per-user basis, meaning it applies to a single-knowledge worker. Sign up for a 30-day free trial on the Cisco website.

Expert Insights’ Comments

Cisco is a trusted provider of advanced email protection for businesses globally. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense streamlines the process of threat remediation by delivering robust, actionable threat data and powerful search capabilities. This enables quick access to message details, facilitating more informed and expedited responses to potential threats. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense also integrates with Cisco Extended Detection and Response (XDR) for rapid message remediation, allowing teams to act quickly and efficiently for maximum threat protection. We would recommend Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense to organizations looking to expand the scope of their defenses, identify specific business risks, and effectively remediate threats.

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Mimecast Logo

Headquartered in Boston, USA, Mimecast is a global email security, email archiving, and continuity vendor. Mimecast Email Security is a consolidation of several cloud-based email security solutions, including email security, security awareness training, cloud archive, DMARC analysis, and web security. Mimecast’s DMARC analyzer protects your organization from spoofing-based attacks. It combines DMARC, SPF, and DKIM protocols to report to admins when the company domain is being used without authorization and can block all unauthenticated mail. The DMARC analyzer detects when IP packets – the bit that displays an email header, including sender ID and location – have been spoofed, and will block and quarantine this content until it has been checked by administrators before acting.

Mimecast Email Security Features

  • Targeted Threat Protection protects your brand from spear phishing, BEC, impersonation, ransomware, and other targeted email attacks
  • URL and attachment protection, which scans for anything harmful including suspicious looking domains and potential attacks that become active after being received
  • Impersonation protection through real-time scanning of all inbound mail to detect anomalies which include: header differences, domain similarity (which is also done through inspecting international character sets, such as replacing the character ‘a’ with ‘á’), sender spoofing, suspicious email content, and time stamps
  • Security awareness training
  • Real time reports
  • Sandboxing, spam filtering, and email continuity features

Pricing: Mimecast’s Email Security product comes in a range of plans, not all offering both solutions covered in this listing. Pricing is supplied via a quotation request.

Expert Insights’ Comments: Organizations looking for an overly powerful solution with a full stack of strong and intelligent features can gain from deploying Mimecast Email Security. Adaptive, powerful, and feature rich, it is highly adept in detecting and filtering out instances of spoofing and impersonation through DMARC, SPF, and DKIM protocols. It has a high level of customer satisfaction, and is generally easy to use, manage, and deploy. End users have a certain level of agency with a self-service tool that grants them limited control such as the ability to block senders. While Mimecast is more suited to enterprises, more affordable, tailored plans are available for small businesses.

Proofpoint Logo

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, USA is Proofpoint, a market leader in email security. Their solution, Proofpoint Email Protection, is a fully featured and integrated email security solution that offers protection from impersonation and spoofing attacks. It is a consolidation of secure email gateway, encryption, management, URL, and attachment defense features, and more. This solution is easily deployable on Microsoft 365, G-Suite, and Exchange mail providers. Admins receive strong granular access policies, flexible yet powerful policy and filter capabilities, and a comprehensive and intuitive interface.

Proofpoint Email Protection Features

  • Range of deployment options
  • Zero-hour threat protection and protection against phishing, spear phishing, and spoofing attacks
  • Spam filtering
  • Emergency Inbox allows automatic access to emails when servers are down
  • Active Directory Integration
  • Admins can also raise user awareness by tagging any emails they think might be an impersonated threat – but can’t be 100% sure. This allows for end-users to check and verify before acting.
  • Clean and intuitive interface with extensive reporting and analytics

Pricing: Pricing is supplied via a quotation request.

Expert Insights’ Comments: Proofpoint Email Protection is adept at safeguarding your business against both spoofing and impersonation-based email threats. The product includes advanced BEC defense which prevents a number of email fraud tactics. This detection engine is AI and machine learning-driven and can analyze header data and subsequent IP packets, sender’s IP address, and the actual content of the email itself for any particularly suspicious words and phrases, or urgent and demanding language. It can also scan for reply-to pivots, malicious IPs, and use of impersonated supplier domains. It is a powerful yet easily and highly scalable solution, making it a strong choice for large enterprises.

Trend Micro Logo

Trend Micro, a Japanese cyber security software company, are a global cybersecurity leader who offer a platform designed to protect organizations and individuals across networks, clouds, devices, and endpoints. Trend Micro Email Security is a comprehensive solution that defends against phishing, ransomware, and business email compromise (BEC) attacks. Compatible with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft 365, Gmail, and other hosted or on-premises email solutions, it integrates with Trend Micro’s security layers to grant central visibility of threats and share threat intelligence across an organization.

Trend Micro Email Security Features

  • Layered protection that includes machine learning, content, sender, and image analysis, and more.
  • Email fraud protection which uses machine learning and expert rules to analyze email content, in addition to using Trend Micro™ Writing Style DNA to conduct authorship analysis
  • Document exploit detection which detects advanced malware and exploits in PDFs, Microsoft 365 etc. using heuristic logic
  • Threat intelligence which correlates web, email, files, domain registries, and other threat sources for early identification of attacker’s infrastructure
  • Blocks emails with malicious URLs before delivery and checks URL safety when users click on it
  • Generate flexible reports

Pricing

Contact Trend Micro directly for pricing information or try the service free for 30 days.

Expert Insights’ Comments

Trend Micro Email security employs cross-generational threat techniques, such as machine learning, sandbox analysis, data loss prevention (DLP), and others, for enhanced protection against advanced threats. In addition to its robust threat defense, Trend Micro Email Security focuses on safeguarding against business email compromise attacks. It does so by analyzing email behavior, intention, and authorship, and can be enhanced by integrating Trend Micro Writing Style DNA for authorship analysis (with Trend Micro Cloud App Security). We would recommend Trend Micro Email security to organizations looking for robust threat defense against impersonation and spoofing attacks, done via behavior analysis and detection.

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The Top 9 Anti Impersonation And Spoofing Solutions