CIEL Corporate Services Ltd, the CIEL Group Head Office adds a layer of CyberAI to bolster its cybersecurity for email.

Email and collaboration platforms are the life of most businesses, where information is shared, customers are supported, and suppliers collaborate. Yet as a human-driven medium, email often represents the ‘weakest link’ in an organization’s security strategy. Indeed, 94% of cyber-threats originate in the email environment.?

Spear phishing, impersonation attacks, and account takeovers, in particular, remain successful ways that cyber-criminals can infiltrate an organization. Increasingly, targeted email attacks of this kind, which overcome the limitations of traditional defenses, are a significant challenge for security teams today.?

About CIEL Group

Founded in 1912, this international Mauritian Group invests and operates in 6 strategic sectors in Mauritius, Africa, and Asia. As a family-controlled Group, CIEL continues its entrepreneurial journey to be the leader in each of its industries. The group has over 32,000 employees with 17.9 BN in revenues across the various group companies and is listed on the Mauritius Stock Exchange.?

Email Security Challenges?

Before turning to Grove and Darktrace, CIEL Group Head Office already had an email security tool in place which was successful in dealing with traditional spam and known attacks. However, with the pace of attacker innovation, they sought to extend their security stack with a platform that analyzed each email in context and protected against the most sophisticated threats which often evaded existing email tools. The Darktrace’s Email solution has provided an additional layer of defense? against:

Advanced impersonation attacks: Modern impersonation attacks involve the attacker inserting themselves in existing conversations between CIEL Group Head Office and customers, using spoofing techniques, and sending fraudulent transaction requests.

Advanced spear phishing using cloud services: Phishing attacks in which the email does not contain any direct phishing link or malicious content, but the recipient is directed to a genuine page such as SharePoint Online, which in turn contains the phishing link or malware.

Advanced malware and zero days: Malware that is newly released for which there are no signatures and therefore bypasses existing controls.?

Account Takeover: A threat actor that gets hold of employees' credentials through a phishing attack, a data leak, or by purchasing them on the Dark Web.?

Data Loss: Darktrace Email has complete visibility over inbound and outbound mail flow. It gives you oversight of potential data loss incidents that may result from account takeover or insider threats and highlights users who are displaying unusual behavior through multiple data loss incidents.

?CEO Fraud: CEO fraud occurs when an attacker uses the authority of a CEO to solicit sensitive information or a fraudulent wire transfer.

“Antigena Email has helped us to fill a dynamic gap in our cybersecurity and now we have the best CyberAI, always learning in real-time about what might target us next,” says Didier St Mart, IT and Digital Officer at CEIL Group Head Office. “It is like having one of our resources looking at all our emails 24/7 but with the added benefit of having the machine learning advantage. We have also been very impressed with the levels of support from both Grove and Darktrace on the project. We are looking forward to expanding our digital coverage using the Darktrace platform soon.’?

At a Glance?

• Darktrace Email has added a complimentary layer of self-learning AI to protect all email communication.?
• Stopping impersonation attacks and novel malware.
• Coverage will extend a layer of visibility and autonomous response across O365 Saas accounts including Teams and Sharepoint.?

Quick and Seamless Installation from Grove and Darktrace

The CIEL Group Head Office team undertook a 30-day trial to see the results of Antigena Email in its own environment and was impressed with the level of support from both Darktrace and Grove, Darktrace’s Partner of the Year in 2020 and 2021.?

The results during the trial were instant and helped CIEL Group Head Office to understand that they were at risk of being targeted by sophisticated email campaigns that were targeting their high-value targets within the organisation. Their current cloud-based email security solution was not able to pick up the attacks that Darktrace Email was blocking.?

Self-Learning AI: A New Degree of Accuracy

Because of its continuous understanding of the CEIL Group Head Office’s users and how they interact, Antigena Email is able to spot the subtle signs of an email threat, regardless of whether it has been seen before in the wild.

After seeing the power of Darktrace’s AI in the email layer, CEIL Group Head Office will be implementing the Darktrace SaaS layer which will give them a seamless experience across email and their SaaS tool focused on O365, Teams, and Sharepoint.?

Darktrace & Microsoft, better together

Darktrace AI understands normal “patterns of life” to detect threats that other tools miss, protecting the dynamic workforce across O365 Email, Teams, SharePoint, and Azure AD.

Darktrace and Microsoft have partnered to help organizations close the security gaps in their multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. Darktrace Email, hosted on Microsoft Azure, complements Microsoft security with Self-Learning AI that detects and autonomously responds to novel email threats that evade other defenses.

Darktrace's Self-Learning AI learns your bespoke business to reveal threats across the full Microsoft 365 product suite, Microsoft Azure, other cloud services, endpoint, and the corporate network.

“Darktrace's groundbreaking approach to cybersecurity has disrupted the global marketplace and it's been an exciting journey to be part of the process and enjoy such success alongside customers like CEIL Group Head Office,” says Johann de Wet, Grove General Manager. “Our role as a leading Darktrace partner is to help customers like CIEL Group Head Office maximise their investment in mitigating cyber risk and this is where we have focused on building a rich customer experience to complement Darktrace's powerful technology.?

?Grove has over 4 years of experience in delivering and supporting Darktrace customers in over 30 countries around the world. At this time, Darktrace and Grove have identified the opportunity to truly challenge expensive, traditional MSSP or SOC programs by helping organisations with small security teams maintain control of the cybersecurity program but with the support of leading cybersecurity experts. This is where we have productized our skills into the Grove dSOC managed solution that will help to:?

• Leverages AI to automate human workloads.
• Provides smart system monitoring and detection.
• Utilises expert cyber analysts in a flexible, cost-effective manner.

Why Grove dSOC

• Grove dSOC offers immediate time to value in comparison to traditional MSP / SOC offerings that take several months before any value is realised.
• Grove dSOC offers Smart Threat detection monitoring for small security teams with limited capacity.
• Grove dSOC offers a Smart Response SLA for on-demand access to cybersecurity expertise as and when required.
• Grove dSOC offers customised and personalised training and reporting to meet unique customer needs.?
• Grove dSOC is a fraction of the cost of hiring and skilling up additional cyber analyst resources.?