San Antonio, TX-based Farm Bureau Bank has signed up with Agari and is now using the company’s Email Trust Platform™ to protect its customers and employees from phishing attacks.
The Agari Customer Protect™ solution has been adopted to protect customers from phishing attacks that abuse its brand, while employees are protected from business email compromise and spear phishing attacks by the Agari Enterprise Protect™ solution.
In contrast to many email spam solution providers that analyze the content of emails looking for common spam signatures, Agari conducts an in-depth analysis of the senders of emails. The DMARC-based system uses a global email telemetry network with the company’s proprietary technology to distinguish between trusted and untrusted senders and blocks malicious emails. By concentrating on the sender rather than content, Agari’s solution is capable of blocking spear phishing and BEC attacks, which often bypass traditional spam defenses.
The Farm Bureau Bank offers a range of online banking services and loans and uses email and the telephone for all external communications. The company sends approximately 1,300 emails a day to its members and agents. As such, the bank is a major target for phishers. The Agari Customer Protect™ solution allows the company to identify brand spoofing and take action before customers suffer losses.
Banks are able to use the .bank top level domain, although before that is possible they must be able to demonstrate they have implemented enhanced security measures to prevent fraud. One of those measures, securing the email channel, needed to be completed before the bank adopted the TLD. Farm Bureau Bank chose Agari as its email security solution provider ahead of the move to the new TLD.
Farm Bureau Bank conducted research on email security and discovered its emails were being blacklisted and third-party companies were not aware of sending email on the bank’s behalf. Farm Bureau Bank VP and Information Security Officer Howard Gordon said, “With Agari Customer Protect, we’re able to ensure that all emails being sent to our members from our domains are authenticated and as a result, we stop malicious phishing attacks that target our customers.”
The bank had already started using Office 365 Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to protect against spam, although the solution was ineffective at blocking spear phishing emails, social engineering scams and other advanced phishing attacks. The Agari Enterprise Protect™ solution allowed the bank to verify the senders of emails and block these impersonation attacks before they can cause any harm.