Mimecast Limited (NASDAQ: MIME), a leading email and data security company, today announced it has acquired eTorch Inc. (d/b/a MessageControl), a messaging security provider with solutions designed to help stop social engineering and human identity attacks with the use of machine learning technology.  The acquisition of MessageControl strengthens Mimecast’s Email Security 3.0 strategy that is designed to improve cybersecurity at the email perimeter, inside the organization and beyond the perimeter. The powerful combination of Mimecast and MessageControl is engineered to provide customers using productivity apps, such as Microsoft 365®, even stronger protection against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks. Additionally, it is designed to prevent the inadvertent loss of sensitive and confidential data, while also serving as an additional sensor to further enrich Mimecast’s threat intelligence.

The addition of MessageControl brings the following key capabilities:

• Machine learning identification of anomalous behaviors.MessageControl’s graph technology is engineered to inspect email attributes and content and then apply machine learning to build a library of known and unknown patterns for an individual user. The technology is designed to get smarter over time and has the ability to make real time decisions on 1 billion plus unique user behavior data points.
• Contextual, real-time warnings in email. MessageControl empowers employees to help make better choices by providing them with more intelligent, contextual, and dynamic warnings of potentially untrusted senders or content into emails
• The ability to prevent misaddressed email data leaks. Leveraging the graph technology, MessageControl is built to notify employees before they accidentally send information to the wrong recipients by using historical sending patterns to predict future anomalies.

“The first half of 2020 has been unlike anything we’ve experienced before. It’s becoming increasingly clear that better innovation is required to protect against the latest weaponized and unweaponized attacks,” said Peter Bauer, chief executive officer at Mimecast. “MessageControl is a natural complement to Mimecast’s suite of cyber resilience solutions – from email and web security through brand protection, security awareness training, and data protection. Its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities will offer additional layers of defense by evolving and ‘learning’ the customer environment and user behaviors over time.  We believe this acquisition allows Mimecast to continue to evolve our Email Security 3.0 strategy and provide the best protection for productivity cloud applications like Microsoft 365.”

Recent research from Mimecast found that impersonation fraud, phishing, and internal threats or data leaks are all on the rise – with IT and security leaders responding that they’ve seen the volume of each increase (60%, 58% and 43% respectively) over the last year. MessageControl’s innovative machine learning is engineered to reveal the hidden risks of email communications by inserting real-time warnings into anomalous emails to help prevent advanced phishing and impersonation attacks.

“Mimecast’s portfolio of solutions offers MessageControl the opportunity to expand its reach to protect even more organizations against the advanced threats plaguing the market today,” said Paul Everton, founder and chief technology officer, MessageControl. “We’re excited to join the Mimecast team as we continue on our mission to stop social engineering and human identity attacks.”