Resources

Blog

My Experience as a Summer Intern at Agari

As with all great internships, I started this summer at Agari being delightfully bombarded with various acronyms and different technologies to learn. But though there was such a wealth of new information, within weeks, I found myself making real contributions to the product and essentially being treated as a full-time engineer.I came into this 10-week internship after my junior year at U.C....
Blog

What Can Businesses do to Keep Secure in the Mobile Working Revolution?

The age of mobile working continues to gather pace. More people than ever before are working from home or on the move, rather than in the traditional office environment. This isn’t surprising. Businesses are becoming increasingly digital and as such, can provide staff with increased opportunities to work outside the office. It isn’t just businesses that are leading the mobile working revolution ...
Blog

Why are my Google Calendar Invites Blocked by DMARC?

Are you sending Google Calendar invites and not getting replies, or maybe your invitees tell you they tried to reply and it was blocked? Or maybe you are trying reply to Google Calendar invites and being blocked saying the mail is not accepted due to your domain's DMARC policy?This is an issue I have been seeing, so I did some digging and I have figured out what is going on. Before I get to the...
Blog

Real Estate Email Scams - Don't Get Tricked!

Every year, more than 5 million homes are bought and sold in the U.S. Given this volume, it should come as no surprise that the real estate industry is a prime target for email-based crimes. Cyber criminals are spoofing (and in some cases taking over) the email accounts of real estate agents, title companies, and others involved in the home buying process. Once the criminal gains access, he or she...
Blog

Productivity & Security with Office 365 + Agari

Companies are flocking to Office 365 as the leading choice of cloud-based email. But while it’s a great productivity enhancer and provides simplicity and cost savings over on-premises solutions, it raises serious security challenges. Threat actors typically target email accounts with identity deception. And with Office 365 being ubiquitous and publicly-discoverable, the risks become even greater...
Blog

Agari named as UK Government G-Cloud supplier to the public sector

We are delighted to announce that Agari is among the suppliers listed on the UK Government’s G-Cloud 9 framework.Agari will now be able to provide its award-winning DMARC Email Authentication service, Agari Customer Protect, to UK public sector organisations through the Government’s secure online store, the Digital Marketplace. Agari Customer Protect is listed in the the Software-as-a-Service ...
Blog

Security vs. Productivity: The Office Macro Dilemma

There is no doubt that macros are being increasingly used to execute malicious code around the world and we have all know what impact it can have on an organization when they strike. But sometimes team members just need to run macros to get their work done. So, what do you do? As a security professional, you want to prevent macros from running because it's safer and you don’t have to work until 3...
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The Google Docs Account Takeover Worm: What Could Happen and How to Protect Yourself

Today, cybercriminals launched a highly effective email scam that included a link to a Google Docs document that was in fact a link to a 3rd party app designed to steal information from the recipient. Worse, the email appears to come from someone known to the victim. Based on information from the Agari Trust Network, we saw more than 3,016 organizations compromised that sent 23,838 emails to Agari...
Blog

The 2 Phases of Email Filtering That Make up the Open Quarantine Process

In my previous blog post, I introduced the concept of open quarantine. This week, I’d like to explore the two phases of email filtering that make up the open quarantine process. Phase 1 - Tripartite ClassificationThe notion of open quarantine depends on being able to perform a tripartite classification of messages into good, bad and undetermined, where the first two categories have a close to...
Blog

Email Filtering and Open Quarantine – The Paradigm Shift

In my previous blog post, I provided examples of the growing sophistication – and subsequent success – of several high-visibility email attacks that used social engineering to evade traditional email security filters. This week, I’d like to introduce a new filtering paradigm: open quarantine.Open quarantine balances the needs of security and usability using a two-phase email filtering process. In...
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Deceptive Emails and Other Types of Cyberattacks

In my previous blog post, I provided examples of the growing sophistication – and subsequent success – of several high-visibility email attacks. This week, I’d like to look at the different types of emails that are enabling these attacks.Deceptive emails are used by cyberattackers to carry out three different types of attacks:To coerce the recipient to follow a hyperlink to a website masquerading...
Blog

Understanding Email Identity

One of the things that often stumps even the most security conscious companies is knowing all the third-party email service providers they are working with. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible for these organizations to protect their customers from phishing attacks if they don’t even know who is sending legitimate email on their behalf. And this gets even more challenging when you...
Blog

Managing Your AWS Costs? Get Ready for a Surprise!

Managing AWS costs is confusing, difficult and sometimes can seem downright hopeless. At Agari, we’ve found Cloudhealth to be a useful partner in measuring both AWS usage and spend. As the saying goes: “what you measure, improves!”.In particular, we’ve found it useful to track daily AWS spend. It's helpful both in terms of understanding what drives costs, as well as heading off unexpected...
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Software Ate My Infrastructure: 2 Years on AWS with Ansible, Terraform and Packer - Part 2

Agari has made significant investment into infrastructure as code. Almost two years into this project, we’ve learned some lessons. In my previous blog post, I discussed organization of your automation repository and parameterizing environments. For this post, I'd like to talk about state management and database automation. State management One of the most frustrating things about working with...
Blog

Software Ate My Infrastructure: 2 Years on AWS with Ansible, Terraform and Packer - Part 1

Agari has made significant investment into infrastructure as code. Almost two years into this project, we've learned some lessons. (If you'd like to read about our first year efforts, check out my previous blog post - Ansible and Terraform at Agari: An Automation Journey.) Our efforts have already yielded dividends by increasing engineering velocity while maintaining infrastructure reliability....
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Document Sanitization and Redaction Safety Net for The Forgetful User

Policies written. Tools provided. Training conducted. As IT leaders, you have sufficiently enabled your users to properly sanitize and redact their documents before sharing outside the organization, but what happens when they forget? Worse, what happens if they intentionally ignore the policy and process altogether? No longer can the sanitization and redaction of documents for secure sharing rely...
Blog

A Summer Intern's Journey into Airflow @ Agari

If you have been following our previous posts, Airflow @ Agari and Leveraging AWS to Build a Scalable Data Pipeline or our recent talks on data pipelines and Apache Airflow, you are well aware that Agari leverages both the public AWS cloud and open source technologies, such as Apache Spark and Apache Airflow, to build resilient predictive data pipelines. This summer, we had the pleasure of...
Blog

Email Headers Explained: Understanding Email Header Information

With the surge of phishing and other advanced email attacks, you can’t be too careful when it comes to your inbound email messages. Beyond viewing the basic information provided, you should make it a habit of viewing and understanding your emails' full headers.