Generative AI (GenAI) transformed the threat landscape, making email a prime target for sophisticated attacks. Phishing, especially business email compromise (BEC), is now the leading attack method. This shift is due to GenAI crafting flawless, hyper-personalized phishing emails that bypass traditional security, often without malicious payloads. These scalable and efficient attacks mimic trusted individuals and create urgency in any language. Traditional secure email gateways (SEGs) and integrated cloud email security (ICES) solutions, relying on static rules and isolated analysis, aren’t enough to address these growing challenges. This siloed approach creates blind spots, overwhelming security teams with alerts and allowing threats to spread quickly through outdated defenses.
Introducing Cortex Advanced Email Security
Palo Alto Networks Cortex Advanced Email Security, now generally available, is built to address these challenges. It's not just another email security solution; it’s a critical piece of the world’s most comprehensive AI-driven security operations platform that’s fueled by enterprise-wide data to deliver unprecedented security outcomes.
Cortex Advanced Email Security empowers your security teams to:
- Understand true email intent with GenAI: Outsmart sophisticated phishing attacks by using large language models (LLMs), behavioral analytics, and user profiling to analyze not only the content but also the underlying intent of communications. This includes LLM-driven sentiment and content analysis, indicators of compromise (IOC) matching, and risk scoring. It also performs deep content inspection of URLs and attachments with Advanced URL filtering & Advanced WildFire.
- Accelerate response with cross-domain data: Reduce detection and response times by correlating rich data from email, identity, endpoints, and your network for a full attack path analysis. It also provides crucial context on related activities, affected systems, devices, and users, along with a causality chain of user behavior and processes involved
- Stop threats with industry-leading automation: Neutralize attacks quickly with industry-leading automation. This includes the near real-time removal and quarantine of malicious messages, automated disabling of compromised accounts, and isolation of affected endpoints. Our natively integrated, industry-leading security automation handles virtually all responses, offering guidance for any remaining actions.
Working as part of the broader Cortex XSIAM platform, the Advanced Email Security module helps support full lifecycle protection, from detection to root cause analysis and remediation. SOC teams benefit from a unified security hub that includes email alerts in addition to alerts from other Cortex solutions. These alerts can be scored through risk evaluations and triaged appropriately.
The result: a platform that correlates email security data with SecOps telemetry for faster detection and response.
Comprehensive Protection for Evolving Threats
Cortex Advanced Email Security is built with cutting-edge AI models to detect and mitigate modern threat tactics, ensuring your organization is protected against a wide array of advanced email-based threats, such as:
- Business email compromise: Leverages advanced AI models to learn the normal communication patterns for each user, enabling the flagging of suspicious anomalies such as a CEO emailing someone in finance from a personal Gmail account rather than their organizational one.
- Defense evasion techniques: Identifies sophisticated evasion tactics, including unique social engineering attempts that often bypass static detection. This capability helps overcome attacks designed to be slightly different to avoid signature-based filters.
- Account takeovers (ATO): Flags deviations in typical user behavior. This module integrates with identity tools to detect suspicious logins, flags impossible travelers, and correlates endpoint anomalies like malware on the user’s machine. It also monitors if a compromised account starts targeting others internally for the purposes of lateral movement.
- Financial fraud: This method detects financial fraud by using AI models to analyze email intent and identify signs of emotional manipulation, such as rushing the recipient into action. By understanding typical financial communication behaviors, it flags unusual financial requests, changes in bank account details, and abnormal vendor communication patterns.
Stop Email Attacks Before Impact
Phishing isn’t a standalone tactic; it’s the initial access vector for a bigger, more destructive goal, whether that be data theft, financial fraud, ransomware attack, or a zero-day threat.
By embedding email protection into the Cortex platform, Palo Alto Networks is changing the way teams defend the inbox and everything beyond. This is just another way we’re leveraging defensive AI to protect organizations and empower security teams to defend at machine speed.
Platformize SecOps for Better, Faster, More Cost-Effective Outcomes
Cortex XSIAM centralizes all your organization's security data onto one unified platform, bringing together all SecOps capabilities. This "collect once, analyze often" approach means we can constantly use this data to develop and add new security modules, such as Advanced Email Security and Exposure Management, and further consolidate your security tools within Cortex. The platform's core strength lies in applying advanced AI and machine learning to this extensive security data, enabling superior threat detection and response by connecting information from all your key sources to reveal the entire attack. With industry-leading automation running natively across the entire platform, threats are neutralized instantly, optimizing your security outcomes and driving significant time savings and cost reductions.
Ready to move beyond traditional email security? Explore how Cortex Advanced Email Security's defensive AI stops threats that bypass legacy solutions.