Auto Warehousing Company (AWC) performs vehicle logistics, accessory installation, and delivery logistics. AWC has facilities all over the United States and Canada and the nature of its business is such that email is the major form of communication that connects AWC with its customers.
“Education about phishing was only taking us so far and that wasn’t far enough. We are more comfortable now that our users are protected from an ever increasing threat environment.”
- Mike Collison, Director of IT at Auto Warehousing
Security before INKY
Prior to engaging INKY, Auto Warehousing Co. (AWC) had taken several proactive steps to secure their corporate email. Associates were provided with awareness training and IT used digital signage combined with frequent email reminders to continually educate the AWC email community. Further AWC had invested in a commercial spam and malware filter that served as the first point of entry for arriving email. Despite these efforts, phishing attacks continued to hit corporate mailboxes.
The team at AWC shared with us their observation that phishing attacks were becoming increasingly cunning and sophisticated. Despite being well trained, the user community's ability to distinguish real communications from email fraud attempts was declining.
Faced with the reality that its email users were being actively phished, AWC sought a solution that could be both an effective preventative measure and also offer crucial in-line awareness training. Ultimately, AWC chose INKY.
The INKY demo
The AWC team was surprised by the speed at which the INKY engineering team was about to deliver a real-world demo. Their fear that INKY would act as a proxy and potentially slow down email traffic was quickly dissipated by INKY’s unique architecture (inline rather than API). The AWC team was also sold on INKY’s superior dashboard capabilities, which provided admins with real-time analysis of the company's threat profile.
Implementing INKY
AWC lauded INKY's speed and hiccup-free implementation. INKY integrated seamlessly with the firm's Microsoft 365 architecture as well as its current 3rd party spam and malware filter. In order to familiarize themselves with the technology, INKY was initially deployed to a targeted user pool. After three days, the team was convinced of INKY’s effectiveness and went ahead with the full 500+ email-account deployment, which took less than 30 minutes. The AWC team had a single question about INKY’s configuration, which INKY engineers took care of in less than five minutes.
The AWC team further noted that INKY’s technical support had been superior in both quality and responsiveness.
Life with INKY
AWC reported that since INKY has been active there have been no successful phishing exploits. AWC elected to allow red-banner emails through (as an option red-banner emails can be filtered to the quarantine folder). The decision to allow suspect phishing attacks were made to educate further the AWC email community on the types of attempts and styles of phishing attacks targeting their organizations. Users have been trained to understand the different banner types, and they know that red-banner emails are not to be touched. INKY’s reporting tools have given the AWC email security team greater insight into who the prime targets for phishing attempts are — notably the executive team and finance department. The main type of phishing email the team sees is "spear phishing." While spear phishing attacks are common, INKY’s ability to detect and reject them is not. The AWC team was particularly impressed with INKY’s blend of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision.
Gone, phishing
The AWC team indicated that, in their opinion, the level of sophistication of phishing attacks is on the rise, and that attacks over the last six months have gotten more creative and nefarious. The AWC team shared that SPAM filtering and awareness training alone were simply not enough to secure their organization from email fraud properly.
AWC’s story is typical for the customers who seek out and engage INKY. Like AWC, the majority of our customers have been diligent about awareness training and spam filtering, but each realized that while filters and training are important, they ultimately fall short, and they understand that even a single successful phishing attack is too costly to risk.
If you haven’t done so yet, we encourage you to take the first step in fully securing your organization's email integrity.
Schedule a demo with one of our reps to see INKY in action.