Customer Story: UCLA - Top of Class in Email Security
Learn how Armorblox protects UCLA from targeted email attacks.
The Customer
The UCLA Anderson School of Management is the graduate business school at the University of California, Los Angeles, one of eleven professional schools. The school offers MBA (full-time, part-time, executive), PGPX, Financial Engineering, and Ph.D. degrees. The school is consistently ranked among the top-tier business school programs in the country based on rankings published by US News & World Report, Businessweek, and other leading publications.
The Challenge
UCLA Anderson was facing an increased volume of sophisticated email threats, such as executive spoofing and gift card requests, targeting students and faculty. These targeted attacks were getting through the email security measures currently in place and increasing the organization’s risk of exposure. The security team at UCLA found themselves at the receiving end of questions pertaining to these targeted attacks, with not enough time to address all concerns coming in from students, faculty, and staff.
The 2021 Verizon DBIR found that 50% of breaches in the Education sector involved social engineering. Around 80% of these social engineering breaches involved Pretexting as a tactic, which is heavily associated with Business Email Compromise.
UCLA Anderson needed an email security solution that stopped these targeted email attacks (BEC, impersonation, gift card requests), was easy to use and showed quick value without requiring too much of the security team’s bandwidth. UCLA wanted highly effective protection against a wide range of malicious attacks while providing students a transparent yet secure learning experience –– and Armorblox was the answer.
The Solution
Armorblox cloud-delivered mail security platform.
The Armorblox platform connects seamlessly over API and provides sophisticated protection against targeted email attacks like Business Email Compromise (BEC), impersonation, account takeover, vendor fraud, and phishing attacks. Armorblox secures email communication through the use of AI and NLU algorithms. Advanced targeted email attacks are stopped, protecting close to 3,000 students, and 500 faculty and staff from compromise.
The Armorblox platform automates the triage of malicious emails into threat categories (e.g. phish URL in the mail body, payment fraud), which minimizes the need for custom policy setup and upkeep. Armorblox provides highly effective protection against a wide range of targeted email attacks - whether they have malicious links, unknown links, or no links at all. Easy-to-consume threat insights are provided for every email, and detected threats, such as socially engineered and BEC attacks, are automatically remediated based on pre-configured actions (delete, quarantine, lock account). These actions are easily configured by the security team and automatically get applied across similar threats; saving time and allowing security teams to focus energy and resources on the threats that need human review.
The Benefit
Armorblox has provided UCLA Anderson School of Management the technology to ensure their students, faculty, and staff are protected and stay secure, without having to drastically change their behaviors to keep security top of mind.
Protection against targeted email attacks that try to steal sensitive data
Armorblox provides highly effective protection against sophisticated attacks, like the socially engineered email attacks that were targeting UCLA students, faculty, and staff.
Howard Miller, CIO of UCLA Anderson School of Management, was pleased with the instant protection Armorblox provided, even before becoming a happy customer:
“When I saw the proof of concept that we did with Armorblox, every email that had caused us a lot of grief and anxiety in our environment over the six month period was caught and contained in quarantine by the Armorblox technology.”
Attacks crafted by fraudsters in an attempt to steal sensitive information and gain resources were successfully detected and automatically quarantined. Armorblox language-based algorithms protect UCLA from even the most sophisticated email threats.
Streamlined security operations and reduction of manual, repetitive work
Eliminating the need for repetitive work, Armorblox gives back valuable time to the security team at UCLA. As a lean security team with multiple priorities, UCLA was looking for a technology solution that is effective while also extending the team’s bandwidth. Armorblox is able to provide this value to UCLA and be that ‘set it and forget it’ email security solution they required:
“What is really neat for me as a CIO is whenever I get an email that looks suspicious, I forward it to the email abuse mailbox. Right away that quarantines the threat for everybody else. And as soon as that happens, the magic starts!”
– Howard Miller, CIO of UCLA Anderson School of Management
With Armorblox connected to UCLA’s user-reported phishing mailbox, the majority of attacks are automatically remediated across user mailboxes, with a single click. This directly benefits security teams with a reduction in remediation time of 92% for user-reported emails.
Watch the full video below to learn why Howard Miller believes,
“Partnering with Armorblox is the best decision we’ve made!”