Email Security Blog

Better Banners: Study Shows INKY Email Assistant Effectiveness

One differentiator sets INKY apart from other email security solutions: the INKY Email Assistant. In the past, we have referred to the assistant as the INKY Banner, but it does so much more than simply plaster a warning on an email. It acts like an assistant sitting at the recipient's elbow, training them on what's wrong with a message, taking input from them, letting them report misclassifications, and giving them more detail, if desired. Each time the assistant appears at the top of an email body, it displays a unique combination of findings from its more-than-three-dozen analytical models. Aside from its distinct color coding (red for DANGER, yellow for CAUTION, and gray for SAFE), the INKY Email Assistant is distinctive in a few ways:

  • INKY Email Assistant is content-aware and applies machine learning models to help employees handle unsafe emails. It's also backed by four million lines of code, making it the smartest and fiercest phish fighter around.
  • In addition to a short descriptive message, a “details” link  is included to provide users with additional insight into any particular issues with the email they’ve just opened. It’s like a mini email security training session baked into every email.
  • INKY’s banner message disappears when an email is forwarded outside of the company.
  • “Report The Email” link allows users to report problematic emails from any device.
  • Companies have the option of customizing INKY’s natural language processing (NLP) to identify sensitive content, such as payment or wire transfer requests.
  • INKY  differentiates trustworthy colleagues and legitimate senders from questionable or dangerous ones, immediately flagging sender, CEO, and brand forgery attempts. 
  • Thanks to native HTML implementation, the INKY Email Assistant works on any mobile device and is compatible with any email client. 

Of course, one of the most important qualities of any warning banner in an email is whether or not it reduces the chances that an employee with click on a malicious link. To better answer that question, we turned to Secure Mentem, a company dedicated to the human aspects of security.

Here is an overview of their recent study.

The Ask: INKY wanted to have an independent, third-party company perform a statistically sound study to determine “how effective INKY Email Assistant was in influencing user determination of the safety of a given email message”. In short, does the assistant keep people from falling for email threats?

The Study: Secure Mentem pulled together 500 email messages, 100 of which were email scams. They formed two groups — of 100 user participants each — to evaluate the email messages. The first group’s emails had the proper corresponding INKY Banner. The second group received the same emails but without any warning banners.

The Findings: Secure Mentem found that users were 48% more likely to identify risky phishing emails when they incorporated the INKY Email Assistant. As a little added icing on the cake, those same users were better at identifying safe emails and didn’t waste their time trying to find any signs of a phishing scam in the emails that posed no harm. That alone was a productivity boost.

If you’re curious about the specifics of the Secure Mentem study, we would encourage you to read the entire report, entitled: Secure Mentem Report: A user study of warning banners as a real-time threat assistant to reduce clicks on malicious emails.

If you’re ready to begin protecting your company from the many email threats that are disrupting all industries, INKY is a wonderful choice. INKY is uniquely effective at securing email — using computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning, to search for signs of fraud. Cost-effective and powerful, INKY can be implemented quickly, regardless of whether your employees work at the office or remotely, and INKY works on any device - including mobile.

Investing in a complete email security solution is no longer something you should consider to be optional. The best way to decide if INKY is the solution for you is by scheduling a free demonstration.

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INKY is an award-winning, cloud-based email security solution developed to proactively eliminate phishing emails and malware while simultaneously providing real-time assistance to employees handling suspicious emails so they can make safer decisions. INKY’s patented technology incorporates sophisticated computer vision, machine learning models, social profiling, and stylometry algorithms to effectively sanitize emails, rewrite malicious links, detect and block security threats, mitigate sender impersonation, and more. Cost-effective and powerful, the INKY platform was developed for mobile-first IT organizations and works seamlessly on any device, operating system, and mail client. Learn more about INKY™ or request an online demonstration today.

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