Cofense®, the leading provider of phishing detection and response (PDR) solutions, announced Cofense Validator, a new and innovative solution designed to empower organizations to independently understand the effectiveness of their secure email gateways (SEGs) by testing them with active, live phishing threats.

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“There are numerous options out there when it comes to selecting a secure email gateway, and they often promise to block 99% of bad emails, some at a much higher cost than others”

Organizations spend a significant portion of their budget on Secure Email Gateways to prevent phishing attacks. Cofense Validator is the first product in the marketplace that offers the ability to continuously evaluate this spend against peers using live phishing data.

Cofense is the only email security company that detects phish that have bypassed SEGs from all major vendors. This dynamic dataset of advanced phishing threat intelligence fuels Cofense Validator on a constant basis offering the ability for continuous validation of a SEG’s abilities. With Cofense Validator, users can:

• Independently test SEG vendors’ claims of “stopping 99% of phishing”
• Benchmark how their SEG compares to other vendors for different phishing tactics
• Collaborate with peers on configuration best practices
• Quickly evaluate how changes to their SEG’s configurations enhance or degrade efficacy
• Proactively alert security teams when filtering changes may have been made by other departments

“There are numerous options out there when it comes to selecting a secure email gateway, and they often promise to block 99% of bad emails, some at a much higher cost than others,” said Aaron Higbee, Cofense CTO and co-founder. “Until now, customers had to rely on ridiculously contrived bake-offs conducted by the SEG vendors using self-serving datasets. Of course, they are going to pass their own test. They know how difficult it is for customers to curate live phishing data to perform their own independent testing. Cofense’s 24×7 visibility into threats such as BEC, ransomware, credential harvesting and malicious attachments that have bypassed major SEGs allows Cofense Validator to be the only objective analyzer of SEG performance.”

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Cofense Validator works by sending real, in-the-wild phishing threats identified by Cofense through a customer’s SEG to see how effective it is at stopping those active threats. Customers realize instant ROI through reports with immediately actionable information. Cofense Validator uses what we know about advanced phishing tactics from Cofense Intelligence to test SEG effectiveness against current, verifiable, live phishing threats – not older threats that are already found on common access deny lists or threats that are cherry picked specifically to make a SEG evaluation look good.