The CDN and infrastructure provider cloudflare seems willing to accelerate its commitment to email protection, something that was already evident a few months ago with the launch of several tools aimed at improving its security. But this time he has done it by purchase of Area 1 Securitya developer company cloud native platformwhich works with various email programs and services, focused on blocking phishing attacks.
Cloudflare is going to pay about 162 million dollars for it, an amount of which between 40% and 50% will be paid in Cloudflare shares. If everything goes according to plan, the closing of the operation will take place during the second quarter of the year. Area 1 Security is no stranger to Cloudflare as they have been using their services for a long time.
Thus, as pointed out by Cloudflare, which suffers continuous attacks, they currently use Area 1 tools to protect their employees from these attackers, and highlight that «In early 2020, our security team saw an increase in employee-reported phishing attempts. Our cloud-based email provider has powerful spam filtering, but fell short when it came to blocking malicious threats and other advanced attacks. Additionally, our provider only offered controls to cover its native web app, and did not offer enough controls to protect its iOS app and other alternative email access methods.«.
The company also details how they managed to increase the security of their mail thanks to the Area 1 tools: «we needed to deploy an email security solution on top of its built-in protection capabilities. The team looked for four main elements in a provider: the ability to scan email attachments, the ability to analyze suspected harmful links, enterprise email compromise protection, and strong APIs for cloud-native email providers. After trying many providers, Area 1 became the clear choice to protect our employees. We implemented the Area 1 solution in early 2020 and the results have been fantastic«.
Thus, Cloudflare has had, thanks to Area 1, the ability to proactively identify phishing campaigns. In addition, they have recordeda significant and prolonged drop in phishing emails«. On the other hand, they have stated that with their highly scalable technology and years of experience in email protection, they will help you improve your global network.
Area 1 has been working in the field of email security for nine years, and has a suite of threat data. The company assures that they have blocked more than 40 million «malicious phishing campaigns to company emails for email compromise purposes, as well as malware, ransomware, and other advanced threats«. According Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare«Mail is the Internet’s largest cyberattack vector, making comprehensive email security critical for any network that truly embraces Zero Trust. That’s why we welcome Area 1 Security to help make Cloudflare’s platform the clear leader in Zero Trust.«.
As for the Area 1 Security CEO Patrick Sweeneyadded that by combining their phishing protection and threat intelligence capabilities, with Cloudflare’s global network, data capabilities and Zero Trust platform, they can help enterprises better secure their entire network infrastructure.
