News
Proofpoint Acquires Return Path’s Email Fraud Protection Business Unit
September 2016 by Marc Jacob
Proofpoint, Inc. has acquired Return Path’s Email Fraud Protection (EFP) business unit. Return Path’s EFP business, which provides standards-based DMARC authentication and proprietary sender-analysis capabilities, will be integrated into Proofpoint’s suite of email protection solutions to further enhance its business email compromise (BEC) capabilities— providing the industry’s most comprehensive solution to combat the threats targeting today’s enterprises.
According to the FBI, BEC messages have cost organizations an estimated $3.1B worldwide1 by tricking people into sending money or sensitive corporate data to cybercriminals. BEC threats and impostor emails may or may not contain malicious attachments or URLs, so they can evade security solutions that only identify malware. In fact, in the last month, eighty percent of a representative sample of Proofpoint customers experienced at least one BEC phishing attack attempt. Proofpoint’s integration of DMARC authentication with advanced security delivered at the email gateway is the industry’s most comprehensive approach to combat both malware and malware-free threats.
Proofpoint Email Protection will now feature EFP-powered DMARC authentication and proprietary sender analysis techniques, which will be available as a separate module to customers and delivered as a cloud service. New BEC campaign forensics will provide administrators with insight into attacker techniques and identify actors using spoofed domains to phish their customers and damage their brand. This enables administrators to quickly implement relevant security processes and policies without additional overhead.
Return Path’s EFP division is based in Broomfield, Colorado, where Proofpoint will open an office and employ all existing employees of the division.
