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Hersha Hospitality Protects Customer and Employee PII from Targeted Phishing Attacks with GreatHorn’s Email Security Platform

January 8, 2019

Waltham, MA – January 8, 2019 – GreatHorn, the leading cloud-native email security provider, today announced that Hersha Hospitality Management (HHM) has selected GreatHorn’s email security platform to protect the company’s cloud-based email from advanced threats. HHM processes about half a million incoming and intra-organizational emails, including those that communicate new HR policies and procedures, guidance from the executive team to regional managers, business changes, and customer requests to more than 2,000 employees in 125 hotels and resort complexes across the United States. To protect Hersha from advanced threats like business email compromise and targeted phishing, GreatHorn couples a powerful automation engine with best-in-class prevention to drive down manual remediation efforts.

Cybercriminals have increasingly targeted the hospitality industry because they handle a wide variety of sensitive data – particularly personally identifiable information (PII). Many hotel brands have reported large-scale data breaches through a variety of threat vectors such as point-of-sale exploits, targeted spear phishing and malware-based attacks. With HHM’s geographically dispersed operations, email remains a critical channel for the company to collaborate throughout the day and night, making it easy for an impersonator to take advantage of its employees’ high standard of responsiveness.

“GreatHorn is obviously just one part of our larger security strategy, but it’s a critical one because of how easy email is to abuse,” said Jason Shane, Vice President of IT at HHM. “With GreatHorn, we get a multi-layered approach to email security. Not just prevention of known threats and targeted phishing attacks, but also in-the-moment user awareness training and incredibly effective remediation tools. As a result, my security team spends less time on email threat management and more time on other critical security areas.”

Knowing that the hospitality industry’s workforce fluctuates significantly, HHM sought an automated email security solution that supplemented its cybersecurity awareness training, supported its cloud-first strategy, and didn’t rely on a gateway. GreatHorn provides complete protection for organizations using G Suite and Office 365 by detecting and stopping email-based threats that legacy tools miss. Architected and built for the cloud, GreatHorn’s solution relies on the combination of advanced threat intelligence and deep relationship analytics to identify both common, known attacks as well as highly targeted, or “zero-day,” attacks.

“GreatHorn can see all email within an organization, giving it an evolving understanding of expected patterns of communication, customized to both the organizational and individual levels,” GreatHorn CEO Kevin O’Brien said. “This means the platform can easily identify anomalies that break from those normal patterns and see phishing attacks that have no obvious known malicious threat. This anomaly-based threat detection also provides Hersha’s end users with context around emails that are suspicious, but don’t quite meet the threshold of an obvious threat.”

For example, if the GreatHorn platform detects that the email references the term “W2,” it might add a banner to the email to remind the user that HHM’s business processes don’t allow for W2s to be sent via email. That additional warning effectively serves as in-context security awareness training for employees and cause the user to reconsider responding with sensitive information.

To learn more about how Hersha Hospitality Management protects their employees from email-borne threats, read the case study at: https://www.greathorn.com/hhm-case-study

About GreatHorn

GreatHorn simplifies email security by automating the cycle of email security – through continuous threat detection, defense, and incident response. Office 365 and G Suite customers using GreatHorn not only gain enterprise-class protection against both sophisticated phishing attacks and traditional threats, they also reduce complexity, manual remediation time, and negative impact on business operations.

By combining deep relationship analytics with continuously evolving user and organizational profiling, GreatHorn’s cloud-native email security platform provides adaptive, anomaly-based threat detection that secures email from malware, ransomware, executive impersonations, credential theft attempts, business services spoofing, and other social engineering-based phishing attacks. More information is available at www.greathorn.com.

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