SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Agari, a leading cybersecurity company, today announced Farm Bureau Bank is using the Agari Email Trust Platform™ to protect its customers, employees and partners from advanced email attacks. Farm Bureau Bank has implemented Agari Consumer Protect to keep its members and partners safe from phishing attacks, and Agari Enterprise Protect to prevent its employees from receiving targeted email attacks including spear phishing and business email compromise (BEC).
Farm Bureau Bank offers a full range of products and services, including vehicle, equipment and recreational loans, personal and business credit cards. The financial institution, which provides an ‘online only’ banking resource for its members, uses email and telephone for all external communication, sending an average of 1,300 emails every day to its members and agents. With the introduction of the .BANK domain in 2015, which requires all financial institutions using the top-level domain to have enhanced security measures in place to prevent fraud from online banking, Farm Bureau Bank needed to secure its email channel before launching its own .BANK initiative.
“Farm Bureau Bank’s sole goal is to make sure all email communications coming from us to our members is always secure, authentic and true. However, we realized fairly early into our email security research that a number of our emails were being blacklisted. In addition, there were third parties who we weren’t previously aware of sending email on our behalf,” said Howard Gordon, VP and Information Security Officer for Farm Bureau Bank. “With Agari Customer Protect, we’re able to ensure that all emails being sent to our members from our domains are authenticated and as a result, we stop malicious phishing attacks that target our customers.”
While Farm Bureau Bank uses Office 365 Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to prevent spam and emails with known malware, the technology doesn’t stop advanced email attacks that use social engineering, encrypted ransomware, or spear phishing. The organization needed to strengthen the security of their inbound email channel, and prevent these emails from reaching their employees’ inboxes.
“Financial institutions like ours are often targets of ‘whaling’ or BEC attacks, which impersonate an executive or trusted partner to try and get our employees to fraudulently transfer money. As part of ramping up our email security efforts, we also implemented Agari Enterprise Protect to prevent these well-crafted emails from ever reaching our employees’ inboxes,” added Gordon.
Between October 2013 and December 2016, the FBI and IC3 has documented $5.3 billion in losses from BEC attacks, a prevalent form of targeted email attack which typically use some form of identity deception – such as emails that impersonate a co-worker, executive or trusted business partner. These sophisticated attacks, which have recently been used to steal as much as $100 million in a single case, trick victims into wiring money, sending employee W-2 information, or opening the company network to hackers. The Agari Enterprise Protect solution is the industry’s only email security solution that stops these difficult to detect attacks by verifying trusted email identities based on insight into 10 billion emails per day.
“Regardless of size or industry, almost every organization we work with catches a BEC attack that gets through their existing email defenses within the first two weeks of implementing Agari,” said John Wilson, Agari Field CTO. “The cybercriminals that launch these attacks are highly organized, persistent and global in scale. It is only a matter of time before most organizations have an employee give up their credentials, wire money or send out personal information about employees such as W-2s.”
Online Resources
- Watch our video interview with Farm Bureau Bank
- Sign up for our webinar: Optimizing Office 365 Email Security
- Download the report: Forrester Research Total Economic Impact of Agari Customer Protect
About Agari
Agari, a leading cybersecurity company, is trusted by leading Fortune 1000 companies to protect their enterprise, partners and customers from advanced email phishing attacks. The Agari Email Trust Platform is the industry’s only solution that ‘understands’ the true sender of emails, leveraging the company’s proprietary, global email telemetry network and patent-pending, predictive Agari Trust Analytics to identify and stop phishing attacks. The platform powers Agari Enterprise Protect, which help organizations protect themselves from advanced spear phishing attacks, and Agari Customer Protect, which protects consumers from email attacks that spoof enterprise brands. Agari, a recipient of the JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation Award and recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Security, is backed by Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures, First Round Capital, Greylock Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners. Learn more at http://www.agari.com and follow us on Twitter @AgariInc.