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KnowBe4 Releases Machine Learning Module for PhishER Platform

Security awareness and training vendor KnowBe4 has added a machine learning module called PhishML to its existing security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform, PhishER. PhishER automatically triages emails as they come in and therefore reduces the amount of effort required from IT personnel.

To improve the capability and effectiveness of PhishER, PhishML will learn from data collected across the PhishER user community. This module, which is free to existing PhishER customers, will tag more than half of incoming emails with confidence levels included. Currently, KnowBe4 markets that PhishML has a prediction accuracy of more than 95%.

Source: KnowBe4 at Software Reviews, Report Published April 2019

Our Take

PhishML is an excellent addition to the PhishER product. When triaging and tagging emails, IT professionals are likely to display hidden patterns: patterns that would be hard for a human to identify but easy for a machine learning algorithm to spot. What’s more, IT professionals have little to no visibility into how other organizations triage and tag their emails. Again, PhishML overcomes this.

Bad actors are constantly learning new ways to craft even more dubious malicious emails by paying attention to which attacks work and which fail. IT professionals rarely have the time to reciprocate this effort by finding patterns within malicious emails. Machine learning algorithms like PhishML are a clear solution to this problem: they can learn as the attacks happen across multiple organizations and they will improve over time at detecting threats at the door.

Bottom Line

Bad actors are constantly developing more effective ways of attacking through email by analyzing which attempts succeed and which fail. KnowBe4’s PhishML module serves as a countermeasure by analyzing malicious emails as they arrive. Over time, these modules will become more adept at identifying malicious emails before they ever have the chance to be read.


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KnowBe4 Press Release

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