GreatHorn Awarded US Patent for New Email Impersonation Detection Method

Waltham, MA – May 1, 2019 – GreatHorn, provider of the industry’s most advanced email threat protection platform, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company US Patent 20170339169 covering one of the many algorithms and threat analysis methods that underlie the GreatHorn Email Security platform. The newly patented method identifies fraudulent email messages that impersonate either the target’s company domain or that of a well-known brand by comparing the input text character string of the incoming and target domain names.

As cybercriminals increasingly turn to executive and brand impersonations to penetrate corporate defenses, identifying the wide variety of spoofing techniques is critical to defending against this exploding threat tactic. Taking two or three letters at a time, GreatHorn’s analysis method assigns a similarity score to each text character based on how visually similar they are to those stored in a computer storage system, taking into account combinations of characters that look similar to individual characters, the similarity of individual characters across different alphabets, and simple additions and deletions. The more visually similar the character strings, the higher the score. If the similarity score of the domain name reaches a certain threshold, the email message is then flagged as a potential phishing threat to customers in the GreatHorn Email Security platform.

“Phishing attacks design techniques such as domain look-alikes specifically to trick the distracted user,” said Ray Wallace, CTO and co-founder of GreatHorn. “With our newly patented analysis methodology, we identify the small, often hidden clues that indicate a threat that a user might otherwise miss. We take pride in giving our customers the reassurance that their email–and any associated credentials or access that it enables– is protected.”

For more information on GreatHorn and its advanced threat protection, please visit https://www.greathorn.com.

About GreatHorn

GreatHorn protects organizations from more advanced threats than any other email security platform. By combining its highly sophisticated threat detection engine with accessible user context tools and integrated incident response capabilities, GreatHorn Email Security shields businesses from both sophisticated phishing attacks and fast-moving zero-day threats, freeing security teams from the tedium of email security management while enabling them to respond to genuine threats faster than ever before.

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.