GITEX 2021: Mimecast to Help Companies Detect Sophisticated Phishing and Impersonation Attacks

Werno Gevers, the Regional Manager at Mimecast Middle East, speaks about his company’s participation at GITEX 2021

Are you participating in GITEX 2021? If yes, which products and solutions will you be showcasing at GITEX Technology Week?
We will be showcasing all our security services during the show – advanced email and web security solutions, brand protection capabilities and awareness training. But we are excited to introduce attendees to our new artificial intelligence offering, Mimecast CyberGraph.

CyberGraph is a new add-on for Mimecast Secure Email Gateway (SEG) that is engineered to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help detect sophisticated phishing and impersonation attacks. CyberGraph creates an identity graph that is built to store information about relationships between all senders and recipients. The graph is designed to detect anomalies and leverages machine learning technology to help organisations stay one step ahead of threat actors by alerting employees to potential cyber threats.

What are your expectations from the event this year?
We hope to continue to grow the brand awareness of Mimecast in the region and to build new relationships. Most importantly we hope to educate organisations about our offering and demonstrate how we can help them in their cybersecurity journeys, with advanced security solutions that can protect them from growing cyberattacks. We will be exhibiting on the stand of one of our distributors, Bulwark Technologies, who will assist us in setting up meetings with strategic partners and prospective customers.

What will be your theme of participation at GITEX?
Attendees at GITEX will want to speak to technology partners who can assist in their digital transformation journeys and cybersecurity needs to be central to these discussions. Organisations in the region are undergoing rapid digital transformation, fuelled by local trends and accelerated by the pandemic. This is great news but it’s also providing opportunities for a growing array of savvy and opportunistic threat actors. We, therefore, want to work with organisations in the region to improve their defences and help protect them from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

How have your regional strategies changed in recent months?
After the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020 and countries across the region went into lockdown, organisations embarked on rapid digital transformation at an unprecedented scale. Roughly 18 months after the first lockdowns, most organisations follow a hybrid work model that sees some employees working from the office some of the time, in between periods of remote work.

Unfortunately, a new picture is emerging. The global cybercrime industry – already experiencing a period of unrestrained growth and expansion thanks to new attack tools and the growing digitisation of our everyday lives – is pouncing on the opportunity to exploit vulnerabilities in hybrid work models.

Our strategy in the region has therefore been to assist organisations with implementing layered security strategies to help protect them from cyber threats in the new normal.

Email, still a favoured attack vector for cybercriminals, needs to be secured with a third-party security tool like Mimecast, that can block highly targeted, sophisticated attacks. And by integrating with other best-of-breed security solutions through our API, you can speed up detection and response.

Critically, business leaders need to develop a culture of cyber security awareness and safe online conduct that limits the organisation’s exposure to risky individual action by employees. Mimecast’s Awareness Training is constant and impactful, helping organisations equip employees with the ability to spot — and avoid — behaviour that could put them and their organisations at risk.

Finally, our brand impersonation tools help organisations prevent the exploitation of their domains. Brands need to look beyond their own perimeters to protect customers and partners from attack. Tools such as Mimecast DMARC Analyzer are essential in protecting their own domains from compromise.

Machine learning-powered web scanning and analysis of key indicators – such as new domain registrations and the issuing of security certificates – could help organisations stop cybercriminals before they can take their impersonation attacks live. Mimecast’s Brand Exploit Protect will help organisations achieve this.