Getting Ahead Of The Latest Threat By Perception Point

By Karen Krivaa, Chief Marketing Officer

What is Perception Point?

Perception Point was founded in 2015 by three innovators who served in elite cyber units in the Israeli Intelligence Corps. They initially developed and patented a technology focused on Zero-days and N-days; highly dangerous advanced persistent threats (APTs), which are extremely hard to detect and even harder to prevent. The HAP™ (hardware-assisted platform) was born. HAP is a dynamic scanning engine (next-gen sandbox) that detonates content on Windows and macOS, leveraging CPU Tracing to, in near real-time, detect malware and zero-day attacks at the exploit stage, in a deterministic manner without relying on known signatures, or historical data.

Perception Point leveraged this game-changing technology as just one of its multi-layered advanced detection engines along with isolation capabilities to build a comprehensive SaaS solution that isolates, detects, and remediates any content-borne attack across an organization’s main attack vectors, including email, cloud collaboration apps and web browsers.

Perception Point has been built as one platform that detects and prevents all threats including phishing, BEC, ATO, malware, ransomware, APTs and zero-days and spam, well before they reach enterprise users. Cloud-native by design, Perception Point is deployed with a few clicks in just minutes, with no change to the enterprise’s infrastructure, and requires very little work on the side of enterprise security teams. The company offers a significant value-added service through its managed Incident Response, which is  included as part of the solution at no additional cost, and boasts an expert team that serves as a force multiplier to an enterprise’s SOC team.

Perception Point supplies unparalleled enterprise-grade cyber protection for organizations of any size, covering the main attack vectors threatening enterprises today, all without disrupting business continuity or changing the way people work.

Perception Point is rapidly growing its customer base, and is externally validated by numerous third parties. In 2021, the company reported that it tripled its annual recurring revenue and customer base for 2 years in a row and was recognized by Gartner for the third time running as a leading Integrated Cloud Email Security Solution (ICES). In June 2022, SE Labs awarded Perception Point an AAA rating for email security services protection, ranking #1 among several competing security providers. SE Labs tested a range of email security services from well-known third-party security vendors and email platforms and the results found that Perception Point achieved a ‘remarkable’ 100% Total Accuracy rating, detecting every threat featured in the test, and returning 0% false positives.

What is Perception Point Capable of?

Cloud migration and digital transformation trends began changing the way companies do business and how people communicate, with 5–20 different communication channels being utilized on average by enterprises. This was supercharged over recent years by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of the hybrid work era that has driven enterprises to adopt a range of modern SaaS and cloud-based tools including email, cloud collaboration apps and storage to solve various issues that come with the decentralized workspace. The accelerated deployment and adoption of these tools, along with the need for remote access to organizations’ sensitive data, has not allowed security teams to catch up. Many organizations are blind to the potentially malicious content that can be uploaded and shared to their networks, and, at the same time, they are not protecting their sensitive data from managed and unmanaged devices. When combined with the increasingly sophisticated and aggressive tactics of threat actors, Perception Point was compelled to develop an advanced solution to better safeguard the organization.

As a one stop shop for the isolation, detection, remediation of all threats across the organization’s main attack vectors – email, web browsers and cloud collaboration apps, Perception Point provides unparalleled protection to reduce breaches, lowers IT friction and through its managed service reduces the SOC resources required in the organization – all while ensuring user productivity.

Perception Point uniquely provides seven layers of next-gen detection capabilities, including the aforementioned HAP™, which operate against any type of attack  via text, files and URLs across the main attack vectors: email, the web, and collaboration tools. This results in not only the best detection rate in the market, but also the lowest false positive rate. The system dynamically scans 100% of content (including embedded files and URLs) at an average scan rate of 10 seconds at an unlimited scale, compared to legacy sandboxing solutions that can take up to 20 minutes and cannot dynamically scan all content.

The HAP™ is a patented next-gen sandbox technology which leverages Intel’s Processor Trace to achieve unprecedented visibility into advanced attacks. All content is unpacked and dynamically scanned without tampering with files. HAP uses CPU tracing as opposed to application behavior and signatures in order to accurately detect APTs and zero-days in near real-time on both Microsoft and Mac – a duality that other solutions have not been able to achieve.

Fueled by this seven-layer advanced detection system, patented isolation technology and a managed incident response service, Perception Point can isolate, detect, and remediate all attacks across both email, collaboration channels, and web browsers.

The SaaS-based Advanced Threat Protection System for Email, Cloud Collaboration Apps as well as the Advanced Browser Security solution are entirely cloud-native from their original design. This provides the speed that customers require, even at scale.The capability to create on-the-fly rules and logic, and automatically update the system to deal with new threats, requires no effort on the part of the customer. The user-friendly nature, as well as the speed, scale and accuracy of Perception Point, is key to its product offering.

The goal of security teams  is to protect their organization as well as the company’s customers; however, this needs to be balanced with daily business continuity and user productivity. Perception Point’s speed and transparent nature ensure that employees or customers do not have to wait for an email or for a file to arrive via a collaboration channel, or experience web browsing delays. Online services that allow third party uploads of files and who promise “real-time” service cannot afford to use inefficient and slow threat protection.

In March 2022, Perception Point acquired Hysolate, a next-gen web isolation platform. This allowed the company to release the Advanced Browser Security solution in July 2022. The solution fuses patented next-gen web isolation technology and Perception Point’s unmatched, enterprise-grade multi-layer detection engines, and due to Perception Point’s focus on usability has the ability to be installed on all standard Chrome, Edge and Chromium-based browsers. This combination delivers the unprecedented ability to isolate, detect and remediate threats from the web while also securing access to sensitive corporate apps via an isolated, trusted Chrome or Edge browser – preventing data loss by design on both managed and unmanaged endpoints. The availability of the Advanced Browser Security solution has allowed Perception Point to become a one-stop-shop for isolating, detecting and remediating all threats across an organization’s top attack vectors – email, web browsers, and cloud collaboration apps.

With the oft-mentioned talent shortage that has plagued the cybersecurity industry over the past decade and the constant need for companies to reign in their outgoings and cut costs, especially in the unique economic circumstances of 2022, enterprise Security Operations Center (SOC) teams are frequently overworked and overburdened – they lack the resources to deal with the challenges they face at the required speed. Perception Point has always emphasized that a first-class customer experience is key, and the company saw a real need for tools to bolster enterprise security operations. Therefore, the company developed a 24/7 managed Incident Response service, included with all Perception Point offerings, that efficiently analyzes, manages and remediates incidents using AI, ML, and human-powered analysis – a lifeline which provides some breathing room for understaffed and overworked cybersecurity teams. The service is an extension of SOC teams, and as a result Perception Point can reduce SOC team resources by up to 75%. Cyber experts analyze incidents to ensure that if something bypasses the system it is immediately remediated across all protected channels. Any update related to new threat intelligence is immediately uploaded so that it can be intercepted the next time it is encountered. End-users can even upload any file or URL that they think may be malicious to be checked by the system and the Incident Response service.

What Does the Future Look Like For Perception Point?

Currently Perception Point covers advanced email security, web browser security, cloud storage security (on Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Drive, S3 Buckets and more), security for Microsoft Teams and the ability to protect proprietary channels via an API. It is available through the Salesforce AppExchange to provide Salesforce security, and the AWS Marketplace.. However, going forward we continuously expand the security coverage offerings through additional integrations and availability on other major marketplaces.

We believe that as attackers become more sophisticated, our solutions need to keep up to prevent attacks. Thus, we are investing in innovative methods, ML and advanced algorithms to maintain the highest detection accuracy in the market. We continue to invest heavily in Mac-based threats as Mac-specific vulnerabilities grow more frequent.

From a business perspective the company has shifted to a partner-first strategy across the globe. The company plans to triple their revenue for the third year in a row in 2022.

About the Author

Karen Krivaa possesses a strong high-tech background and over 20 years of experience in product and portfolio solutions marketing and corporate marketing management. Karen’s executive vision and belief in “team” are the core tenets that drive the company’s strategic marketing planning and execution, as well as awareness and customer acquisition efforts across all channels. Prior to joining Perception Point, Karen held leadership positions in companies including RADVISION, Alvarion, NICE, Applied Materials and GigaSpaces. Karen holds an M.Sc in Applied Chemistry and MBA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalemcan be reached online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-krivaa-314505/ and at our company website https://perception-point.io/