More than $9 billion in direct losses from advanced email threats. $1 billion in ransomware payments. Six million personal identity records stolen every 24 hours—at an average cost of $7.9 million per breach.
If you think the crushing losses stemming from an endless barrage of spear-phishing schemes, business email compromise (BEC) scams, and other advanced email attacks were bad in 2018, just wait until you see the sequel.
As it stands now, losses from cybercrime in all its forms are expected to top $2 trillion in 2019. And at least half of those losses will begin with a malicious email that hits an employee inbox undetected.
It's my job to help change all that. As Agari's new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), I lead worldwide sales, channel, and customer success operations. Our mission is as bold as it is inspiring—to protect digital communications to ensure humanity prevails over evil.
In twenty years of leading sales and market development operations for companies at the vanguard of cybersecurity, including Cylance, Websense, and Forcepoint, I've seen firsthand the financial and competitive havoc caused by the advanced threats facing organizations in every industry and region.
For me, accepting Agari's newly-created CRO role was an easy "yes," for the following five reasons.
#1: Email Remains the Top Attack Vector
Despite the rise of secure messaging apps, email remains the business world's most trusted application for communication and collaboration. But it has always had a glaring security flaw—the ability for anyone to send an email claiming to be someone else. Even as businesses have spent billions erecting security controls to safeguard this critically important channel, cybercriminals have been perfecting attacks that blow past these systems undetected. With business email compromise and other advanced email scams surging 60% in the last year, email is one of the biggest "unsolved mysteries" in cybersecurity. I want to be on the team that's solving it.
#2: Employee Training Can Help—But Only to a Point
Thanks to email's inherent vulnerabilities, today's most successful cybercriminals no longer target computer systems, but instead hack the human psyche. Through highly-personalized, socially-engineered email attacks, recipients are manipulated into anxiously divulging sensitive information or wiring funds before thinking to verify the legitimacy of the message. Today, 30% of corporate employees will open a phishing email, and 4% will fall for it. But while phishing awareness training is a smart investment, the quality and sheer volume of new email threats mean organizations will also require a modern, technological approach to securing this channel. Agari is the only solution that combines predictive data modeling and real-time intelligence from trillions of emails to stop attacks from ever even reaching those human targets.
#3: Cloud-based Email is in the Crosshairs
Microsoft Office 365, G-Suite, and other cloud-based platforms not only reduce operations and management overhead, but they also offer a stable email experience with all the security controls modern businesses employ today. But advanced email threats aren't going away—they're evolving. And while platform-based security controls are effective at weeding out spam, malware, and malicious links, they're defenseless against PhishPoint attacks and other emerging email schemes targeting businesses in the cloud. The good news is that Agari's got this. In fact, two-thirds of organizations find that Agari, combined with their cloud platform's built-in security controls, delivers everything they need to defeat evolving email threats. That makes Agari uniquely positioned to help organizations migrate securely to the cloud.
#4: Momentum Makes the Leader
Agari has reinvented email security for the cloud era, establishing the new standard for protecting against advanced email threats and giving control of the email channel back to Information Security and Messaging Operations so that end users can open, click, and trust everything that hits their inboxes. With a rapidly growing customer base—including a veritable who’s who of category-leading organizations—and a significant number of partners around the globe, Agari truly has a scalable, enterprise-class solution that is setting the standard in a crowded field. Looking at Agari’s leadership team and the depth of talent in the extended organization, I’m delighted to help guide the organization through the next stage of accelerating growth.
#5: It's More Than a Role—It's a Mission
The cybercriminal operations behind today's most advanced email threats are as well-funded and professionally organized as any business today. And they're armed to the teeth with the war machines to carry out highly-targeted scams on organizations around the world. By modeling communications across individuals, organizations, and infrastructures at Internet scale, Agari is the only solution that establishes the good to stop malicious email activities in their tracks. Getting to score points for the good guys while hobbling some of the world's most dangerous threat actors? That pretty much sealed the deal.
To learn more, access our official announcement on my appointment as Chief Revenue Officer here.