Mimecast Beefs Up Email Security with MessageControl Acquisition

Mimecast is buying MessageControl, an email and messaging security provider, to strengthen its email security strategy.

MessageControl helps stop social engineering and human identity attacks with machine learning (ML) technology. Mimecast didn’t say how much it paid for MessageControl.

Together, the two companies will offer customers stronger protection against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks while using productivity apps like Microsoft 365. Additionally, they will protect against the inadvertent loss of sensitive and confidential data. MessageControl also will further enhance Mimecast’s threat intelligence.

Peter Bauer is Mimecast‘s co-founder and CEO.

Mimecast’s Peter Bauer

“The addition of MessageControl strengthens Mimecast’s email security 3.0 strategy to help partners address customers’ threats at the email perimeter, inside the organization and beyond so that they are covering all their bases,” Bauer said.

More Email Security Benefits

Mimecast email security will get more benefits from the MessageControl acquisition. They include:

• Using machine learning to build a library of known and unknown patterns for an individual user. And making real-time decisions on 1 billion-plus unique user behavior data points.
• Giving users more intelligent warnings about potential untrusted senders or content into emails.
• Notifying employees before they accidentally send information to the wrong recipients using historical sending patterns to predict anomalies.

“The acquisition of MessageControl gives Mimecast the ability to see further into the life cycle of an email attack by utilizing ML capabilities to identify anomalous behaviors, receive real-time, contextual warnings in an email, and prevent misaddressed email data leaks,” Bauer said. “The technology is designed to get smarter over time.”

Recent research from Mimecast found impersonation fraud, phishing and internal threats or data leaks are all on the rise. IT and security leaders have seen the volume of each increase over the last year.

“Bringing MessageControl under the Mimecast roof will expand [MessageControl] partners’ reach by allowing them to offer stronger protection against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks within a suite of cyber resilience solutions — from email and web security, through brand protection, security awareness training and data protection,” Bauer said.

“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, MessageControl’s founder and CTO. “We’re excited to join the Mimecast team as we continue on our mission to stop social engineering and human identity attacks.”

In January, Mimecast bought Segasec, a provider of digital threat protection, to provide brand exploitation protection using ML to identify potential hackers at the earliest stages of an attack.