Alter Blog   •   October 29, 2021

The good guys are losing!

Attackers have the edge and corporations are more at risk than ever before. Humans are a weak link and even the most technically savvy executives can be lured into providing personal information, credentials or installing malicious apps that can undermine even the most sophisticated cybersecurity defenses. The shift in working anywhere, anytime is exacerbating the problem and requires protecting users at the last mile, on-device and on the web browser.

According to the FBI,  phishing incidents nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020 with an 11x increase in complaints compared to 2016.

Targeted phishing attacks are often carefully planned and collect information from multiple channels leaving humans and their companies at risk. Once reliable security strategies, including secure email gateways (SEGs), firewalls, and proxy servers, are not enough to stop these new cyber threats and protecting email alone is a losing strategy. All the clues humans use to detect these attacks are not present and expecting human intervention is not a practical solution.
As a board member, employee, and internet user this is a nightmare, but as a venture capitalist and investor in start ups, this is a massive opportunity that can help organizations protect themselves from financial loss and embarrassment that erodes customer and employee trust.

SlashNext

SlashNext’s zero-trust, AI-based behavioral analysis is succeeding where other tools are failing by identifying the most sophisticated attacks and blocking them in real-time across all channels including email, mobile, sms, and social.  SlashNext has viewed billions of websites and actively inspects over 7 million URLs daily.  A truly unique product, SlashNext emulates human cognitive reasoning to respond accurately without human intervention enabling customers to find 67% more malicious URLs than all other technologies. They do this in real time to protect users from zero-hour and targeted attacks occurring in email, sms, social media, and mobile applications.

Atif Mushtaq, the visionary founder behind SlashNext and one of the main architects of FireEye’s core malware sandbox technology, recognized phishing detection, like malware, needed to move from signature-based reputation techniques to behavioral analysis. What was needed was a faster, more automated, and accurate approach to phishing detection. With that knowledge, SlashNext built an Artificial Intelligence (AI) phishing detection engine with virtual browsers and behavioral analysis using computer vision, natural language processing, and several machine-learning classifiers to detect and stop well-crafted multi-payload phishing attacks often delivered through multiple communication channels, including legitimate infrastructure.

Today, as humans have moved completely to the cloud, using apps, browsers and mobile devices to communicate with work, family, and friends, SlashNext is uniquely positioned to stop multi-channel phishing and human hacking.

Alter is proud to support SlashNext and help companies with a critical tool in fighting cyber crime.