TAP is worth its price. It really saves time and makes your network save.
July 18, 2019
TAP is worth its price. It really saves time and makes your network save.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection for Email
TAP is an optional module for Proofpoint Email Security that can be licensed. It consists of "URL Defense" and "Attachment Defense." The first one is a mighty tool which provides security for inbound mail traffic by analyzing (and blocking) access to harmfull external URLs. 'Attachment Defense' is even mightier. As a company, you get a lot of emails with attachments, especially documents like PDFs or Microsoft Office file formats. Attachment Defense is a Sandbox cloud service provided by Proofpoint, which analyzes these files and checks if they contain bad content like malicious macros. All normal Antivirus scanners work signature-based, so they are not able to open a document like Adobe Reader or MS Office would do it. This is what Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection does for you. Up to now, there is no other way to automatically check every attachment this way (Sandboxing).
- It's a carefree solution for automatic approval of (bad) attachments.
- A carefree solution for automatic approval of bad URLs.
- Alerts for admins if the attachments or allowed URL clicks afterwards turned out to be malicious.
- A lot of information about malware campaigns inside the TAP Dashboard, and useful info, like who's the most attacked target in your company.
- Expensive (but justified).
- A lot of German companies are very sensitive about their data and privacy. You have to trust Proofpoint here.
- More Security in general!
- It really saves time. As admin, you don't have to deal with potentially bad stuff inside Emails anymore.
- You learn more about your users. For example: who is an often victim? who gets a lot of phishing mails?
I know that other vendors also provide cloud-based services (sandbox systems), but I have not tried them yet. The reason for me to choose TAP was that it is compatible with Palo Alto Networks WildFire. Both cloud services can complement each other, and thus you can profit by having even better detection results, especially regarding unknown URLs/Domains.