Abnormal Security
Malicious actors are constantly getting smarter—and that means we have to be smarter, too. Abnormal AI is security software that’s going to help us do just that.
In 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that business email compromise (BEC) attacks, which is a type of scam that occurs when organizations are targeted by threat actors using email to pose as trusted parties asking for funds, cost the global market nearly $55 trillion over a 10-year period. What’s more, artificial intelligence is being used more and more in these types of attacks, 83 percent according to CSO Online.
Miami itself is no stranger to the threat of phishing attacks and threat actors trying to take advantage of our helpful nature.
With the glut of threat activity happening at every turn, how can we stem this tide? How can Miami best protect our data—and our students’ data? This is where Abnormal comes in.
Abnormal is a cloud-based email security add-on for Google Workspace that helps organizations like Miami stop cyberattacks before they start—before they even reach your inbox. It’s an extension of the security tools in Google Gmail, enhancing what Google is already doing to protect against sophisticated threats like phishing, BEC, and account takeover attacks.
What’s more, the API synthesizes communication patterns from across an organization and “learns” when to alert—that is to say, if a person emails something out of the ordinary to an audience they normally wouldn’t, Abnormal flags that message.
By analyzing email traffic and messages, Abnormal helps pinpoint bad actors and block malicious addresses. Abnormal uses AI and machine learning to remove phishing attempts and malware attachments before they get to your email inbox—thereby preventing threat activity at the source.
Protecting the data of faculty, staff, and students is all of our responsibility. As malicious actors continue to change the way they attempt to compromise our systems, so too must we change to meet that threat. AI tools are being used by these threat actors to create hyperpersonal, convincing attacks that a human may not catch, but Abnormal uses machine learning to help prevent these kinds of attacks.
Here’s the good part: You will largely be unaffected. In fact, you will start to see fewer scams and malicious phishing emails in your inbox and spam folder as a result of adding Abnormal Security to our Google Workspace native email protections, since it will directly extract phishing attempts from Gmail. Once Abnormal detects a threat, it will remove the offending message—so that you stay safe.
The long and the short of it is: Your privacy is highly important to us, and it’s the reason IT Services is using Abnormal and other regular Gmail functions to monitor our email. We want your data to be secure, and removing a phishing attempt before it has the chance to strike a vulnerable party is an efficient way to guarantee that security.
