Abnormal Security, headquartered in San Francisco, offers a secure email gateway to that protects Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace accounts with AI threat detection. The solution is designed to prevent phishing and scams, high-level account impersonation, or supply chain attacks (i.e. invoice fraud).
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Zscaler Internet Access
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Zscaler Internet Access™ (ZIA) is a secure web gateway (SWG), delivering cloud native cyberthreat protection and zero trust access to the internet and SaaS apps.
Another local organization was compromised, and we were one of the targets of their further attempts. We were 100% protected because the behavioral analysis protected us, but also allowed me to contact that organization and report their compromise. This has actually happened more than one time since going live.
Zscaler Internet Access is an internet tunnel that pairs with the network adapter to secure traffic between servers and workstations. It can refresh policies automatically and log intrusions but does not broadcast intrusions. Cloud-based Zscaler Internet Access is easy to deploy and scale, with no hardware or software needed. In a hybrid model, Zscaler Internet Access performs some security functions on-premises and others in the cloud, allowing organizations to keep infrastructure. There is a slight learning curve from VPN and appliance architecture to this paradigm.
Spam filtering...we have been able to turn our spam sensitivity down on Exchange allowing more legitimate messages through to user inboxes.
Malicious email filtering...we experienced several successful phishing attacks over the past year. Abnormal Security has prevented hundreds of individual campaigns since going live in August '22. I cannot thank them enough!
Automated response for reported emails...my team is small and we do not have enough hours in a day to review and respond to each reported email. Abnormal Security performs additional analysis on those reports and automatically responds for us. If the message is spam or malicious, copies of those emails are looked for throughout the server and deleted.
My personal opinion about Zscaler is their idea is that all the services are online and are moving to the cloud but the truth is some of them have to stay on-premise and employees still need to work from an office. Zscaler simply doesn't have any on-premise solutions like an NGFW to provide a complete package. We are supporting Fortinet NGFW for our on-premise solution.
As mentioned earlier Zscaler being hosted online we don't get the full flexibility of managing our firewalls. Although it's a good thing we keep running into problems like when we want to allow list a service from a specific source IP Zscaler cannot provide a static IP for that. They route traffic through multiple IP addresses and the IP's keep changing every 15-20 minutes. So you cannot allow list a specific IP on the receiving end. The only way to move forward would be to allow an entire range of IP's which opens a security loophole on the receiving end.
For every small thing we have to keep opening a ticket with Zscaler. Their response rate is fast but still in a fast-moving world it's not fast enough. Especially since we need to get approval from our change control to get something done and then again we have to raise a ticket to get something done from the Zscaler side.
Zscaler is a mandatory solution required by almost every large organization with a workforce working remotely or using cloud-based apps. Its deployment is relatively easy and it keeps on working in the background without actively bothering the user. Apart from a few weird messages which a user is unable to comprehend, Zscaler is able to provide fast and safe access to the internet and other external applications.
I cannot give a fair rating for this as I have not had to contact Zscaler support. There was one time we had to contact them because we needed to check if they were having issues on their end. Our ISP was actually the problem but support seemed very friendly.
Abnormal Security blocks malicious emails that both PhishER and Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense miss. One thing that PhishER does have is the ability to flip a malicious message into a user education phishing email. That's cool, but I think we can just copy/paste the same info into a custom campaign.
Zscaler Intenet Access proved to be superior and the difference for us was the speed of policy delivery since your policy is applied in a web console and is effective in a matter of seconds. Another point to congratulate the solution is its compatibility with different platforms (macOS, Linux, Windows, Android, and iOS).