At a glance
With sensitive data exchanged via email and employees with diverse technical abilities, My Space Housing needed to find an intelligent solution that would prevent advanced phishing threats and human error from compromising residents’ privacy.
My Space Housing now leverages Egress’ AI-powered Intelligent Email Security Platform with the aim to eliminate the entire spectrum of email threats with real-time alerts that provide in-the moment training.
Human error and advanced phishing attacks threaten confidential information
As a registered social charity that provides housing to some of the most vulnerable individuals across England and Wales, it is imperative My Space Housing Solutions (My Space Housing) can safeguard residents’ privacy and uphold the integrity of their operations.
“Given the varying technical abilities of our employees combined with the vast amount of sensitive resident data exchanged with external parties over email, there was an ever increasing risk of individuals’ information being compromised and exploited,” explains Dean Warburton, IT Manager at My Space Housing. “Whether the risk came from interacting with advanced phishing emails like impersonation attacks, accidentally sending an email to the wrong recipient, or even innocently sending information to a personal device, we weren’t able to confidently rely on the native protection provided by Microsoft 365 to stop these threats.”
As a result, Dean started looking for a comprehensive solution that could overlay Microsoft 365 to help protect against the entire spectrum of inbound and outbound threats over email.
Evaluating solutions: One vendor for all inbound and outbound threats over email
Following a competitive evaluation of different solutions, My Space Housing implemented the full Egress Intelligent Email Security Platform across 250 users to bolster their defenses against phishing threats and to make positive steps to safeguard tenant data.
Comprised of Egress Defend, Egress Prevent, and Egress Protect, the platform seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365, utilizing AI models and an adaptive security architecture to detect and respond to threats, as well as providing real-time nudges to alert users before security incidents can occur.
Defend leverages pre-generative and zero-trust models, as well as linguistic, contextual, and behavioral analysis to detect advanced phishing attacks, such as impersonation attacks that employ technical measures to evade traditional detection. On the outbound, Prevent and Protect combine contextual machine learning, intelligent DLP, and encryption to ensure emails are sent to the correct recipients, containing the right information, and are appropriately protected relative to the level of risk.
“Egress was the natural choice – we covered multiple bases in one solution, and we’ve already seen a massive improvement in security awareness,” says Dean. “From the actionable intelligence in the Egress Security Center, it’s clear that the Prevent prompts are having a profound impact on the employees’ understanding of our data protection policies. The real-time alerts allow our users to pause, reflect, and critically assess what information is about to leave the business, meaning errors are proactively addressed before a security incident occurs.”
In addition, Dean favored the dynamic Defend banners, stating they have played a pivotal role in enhancing employees’ awareness and response to potential threats.
“Egress was the natural choice - we covered multiple bases in one solution, and we’ve already seen a massive improvement in security awareness.”
Dean Warburton, IT Manager, My Space Housing
The real-world impact: Egress in action
After deploying Defend, My Space Housing noticed an uptick in advanced attacks targeting the organization. Dean explains: “Our HR team received a number of phishing emails impersonating senior stakeholders, using sophisticated social engineering tactics to request a change in payment details. Although these attacks didn’t contain a conventional payload, Defend was able to detect and neutralize these emails.”
Dean and the team at My Space Housing were particularly impressed with the administration capabilities in the Egress Security Center. “The individual product dashboards give us unprecedented insight into what’s happening behind the scenes. We now have visibility into the types of attacks targeting employees, who our riskiest users are, and recipient engagement with encrypted emails.”
Dean concludes: “Egress has enhanced every aspect of our native security in Microsoft 365. With it’s frictionless nudges and insightful analytics, Egress has become an indispensable asset in safeguarding our operations against evolving phishing threats and human error.”