Valimail makes it harder for hackers to impersonate your boss over email

Published July 11, 2018

Valimail, a company that focuses on preventing fake and fraudulent emails from reaching your inbox, today announced that it is extending its anti-impersonation platform with a couple of new features that will make it even harder for hackers to pretend they are somebody they are not.

While Valimail’s original focus was mostly on ensuring that your outgoing email was trustworthy, the new solution, dubbed Valimail Defend, centers around two types of attacks that use fake incoming emails: those that come from lookalike domains (think tech-crunch.com) and those that rely on “friendly-from spoofing,” where attackers manage to make the incoming email address look like it’s from a legitimate user, often within your company.

“We’ve built our cloud-first anti-impersonation solution to be completely automated from the ground up, and the data is clear: We have the highest rate of effectiveness in protecting our customers’ domains from impersonation,” said Valimail CEO and co-founder Alexander García-Tobar. “Valimail Defend is the latest step in the evolution of our deep industry expertise, giving enterprises and government organizations the most advanced protection against email impersonation.”

The new service will become available in Q3 and will complement the company’s existing solutions under its Valimail Enforce brand, which provides services like email authentication for outgoing messages through DMARC enforcement and a number of other techniques.

Since a large number of security breaches rely on spoofed emails, preventing those kinds of scams is now something that many a company’s chief information security officer is looking at. Often, these scams can be prevented with some basic rule-based approaches, but Valimail argues that its machine learning-driven approach is significantly more effective.

Current Valimail customers include the likes of Splunk, City National Bank and Yelp. “Valimail’s automated approach has proven to be both effective and efficient, as it’s saved us countless employee hours compared with other approaches and got us to enforcement effortlessly,” said Vivek Raman, the director of engineering at Yelp. “We are excited about this next generation of automated anti-impersonation technology from Valimail, which will give us the full end-to-end solution.”