In right now’s dynamic menace panorama, securing the digital entrance traces is paramount. At Cisco, with greater than 326 million emails incoming every quarter, we confronted the identical problem many organizations do: how one can defend in opposition to refined electronic mail threats whereas sustaining consumer productiveness. Our reply was a daring, layered safety method, powered by AI-driven options like E mail Menace Protection and the superior analytics of Splunk. Right here’s how we did it, and what we realized.
The rising menace panorama
E mail: It’s the only main assault vector for safety breaches for companies throughout the globe. In 2023, the FBI reported $2.9 billion of enterprise losses attributed to electronic mail cyberattacks within the US, an alarming improve of over 805% since 2016. Since 2022, electronic mail ransomware incidents are up 18%. These looming threats develop on daily basis and underscore the crucial want for a strong, multi-layered electronic mail safety technique.
Whereas native electronic mail filters present a baseline stage of safety, they’re inadequate in right now’s complicated menace atmosphere. In Cisco IT, we acknowledged this hole and commenced constructing a plan to boost our defenses.
Nevertheless, as we have been crafting a plan, a brand new drawback rose in precedence. Our executives have been annoyed with inboxes filled with spam, advertising, and litter. A fast session with Cisco Talos confirmed our plan, and we got down to improve our front-line electronic mail defenses — and rapidly.
Placing our plan into motion
We leverage many options throughout Cisco’s safety portfolio to maintain us digitally resilient. However we knew that bringing the items along with the AI-driven capabilities of Cisco E mail Menace Protection and Splunk would give us an unparalleled benefit: deeply built-in, layered defenses that scale back gaps, improve safety of customers and units, and safe entry to purposes. Over the previous decade, we’ve got carried out a layered method to guard our customers on any gadget, anyplace they join, leveraging:
- Cisco XDR, which acts as a bridge between our safety purposes. It unifies our safety insights and correlates information throughout a number of domains.
- Cisco Safe Malware Analytics, which determines if incoming information include malware by isolating and opening them on a digital machine, then analyzing system impacts. This powers extra knowledgeable menace detection.
- Cisco Safe Endpoint, which protects our endpoints by figuring out and blocking information containing malware, together with details about who might have opened and/or shared these information.
- Cisco Safe Endpoint Analytics, which supplies endpoint gadget visibility, discovering endpoint threats earlier than they’re an issue together with day-zero malware, harmful consumer habits, information exfiltration, and so forth. It sees what purposes or Software program as a Service (SaaS) are in use, makes use of forensics for incident response, and positive factors visibility to gadget varieties and working methods on the community.
- Cisco Umbrella, which provides information and insights about particular domains, enabling us to dam these with poor reputations.
- Cisco Endpoint Safety Analytics Constructed on Splunk (CESA) with Cisco AnyConnect Community Visibility Module (NVM), which feeds us wealthy consumer habits information for electronic mail menace investigations. The NVM is the one expertise for cellular units that creates IPFIX information (IP Move Data Export). It plugs into CESA, which delivers the entire required Splunk analytics software program crucial to research NVM telemetry.
And in Could 2024, going through more and more complicated threats, we deployed Cisco Safe E mail Menace Protection to mitigate threats in actual time. This platform enlists 90+ AI language fashions (LLM) detectors to mechanically detect electronic mail menaces, then it proactively takes the crucial subsequent steps to guard the enterprise. This innovation saves us 1000’s of hours of manually sorting, learning, and gauging intent of emails, with a lot of room for human error. As dangerous actors more and more utilize AI, E mail Menace Protection ranges the taking part in subject for us.
The E mail Menace Protection affect report presents full visibility into AI-tracked threats, displaying tendencies over time in addition to additional insights and analytics.
For Cisco IT, integrating E mail Menace Protection was seamless, taking solely a matter of days.In actual fact, since deployment day, we’ve acquired zero complaints from the enterprise and 0 destructive affect on our workers’ expertise. With E mail Menace Protection on prime of our present layers of electronic mail safety, worker mailboxes not should deal with enterprise electronic mail compromise (BEC) the place dangerous actors impersonate trusted sources to steal cash from companies, phishing, or different threats. From malware to advertising spam, we will rapidly determine and remediate every kind of undesirable mail, and do with it as we see match organizationally, whether or not it’s shifting it to the junk folder or blocking it altogether.
Elevating incident response with Splunk’s superior analytics
Even with our entrance traces being well-protected by our strong layered defenses, our groups wanted extra to remain forward of dangerous actors. In April 2025, our incident response crew built-in Splunk into our operations, giving us entry to a few of the most progressive safety developments available on the market.
With Splunk Assault Analyzer, Cisco now allows automated menace evaluation and digital forensics for credential phishing and malware. Its proprietary expertise extracts and analyzes malicious content material hidden in textual content, photographs, macro supply code, web site content material, and extra. This automation considerably improves our crew’s operational effectivity, saving analysts’ time and enhancing the flexibility of our crew to analyze complicated phishing threats with larger pace and accuracy.
Quantifiable affect: Attaining resilience at scale
For Cisco, our layered method is constructed to frustrate the attacker, not the consumer. On the subject of attackers, we’ve had a lot. Throughout a typical quarter, Cisco mailboxes collectively obtain greater than 326 million inbound emails. For us, “one in 1,000,000” isn’t ok in relation to safety. Our unified portfolio stops threats of their tracks.
Let’s break down the affect of our method over a typical quarter:
- 41,000,000 (12.57%) emails blocked for having poor IP reputations
- 23,000,000 (7.05%) emails blocked for DMARC failures (Area-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)
- 6,800,000 emails blocked for spam
- 49,000 emails blocked for having poor area reputations
- 1,940 emails blocked for holding viruses
- 840 emails blocked for holding malware
- 70,000 extra emails confirmed threats blocked by E mail Menace Protection’s LLM detectors
- Hundreds extra emails blocked for different varied causes
This stage of visibility, integration, and automation is unmatched out there. While you’re coping with various customers, workplaces, and a mixture of managed and unmanaged units, there’s no different to a layered complete, platform-based method. Our technique successfully closes gaps within the assault floor to make our methods as well-defended as attainable.
For IT and safety groups our journey presents crucial classes:
- A layered protection is non-negotiable: Counting on single-point options is inadequate. A complete, built-in portfolio is crucial.
- AI is a drive multiplier: AI-driven options like Cisco Safe E mail Menace Protection considerably improve menace detection and scale back handbook overhead, even leveling the taking part in subject in opposition to AI-powered assaults.
- Automation and analytics are key to effectivity: Options like Splunk Assault Analyzer automate crucial processes, releasing up priceless safety crew sources and bettering incident response.
- Integration is paramount: The true energy comes from seamlessly connecting safety instruments, making certain information correlation and unified insights throughout your atmosphere.
Wanting forward: Persevering with to construct a future-proofed office
We’re not completed constructing but. Cisco’s integration of AI, Splunk, and electronic mail safety represents a paradigm shift in how organizations can method safety and office innovation. By combining cutting-edge expertise with a unified imaginative and prescient for the way they’ll work extra successfully collectively, we’re not solely defending our entrance traces but additionally setting a brand new commonplace for resilience and adaptableness within the fashionable office. We’re bringing expertise collectively to attain issues which have by no means been attainable earlier than.
Constructing on this basis, our incident response crew is within the early phases of deploying Splunk Enterprise Safety as a part of our evolving electronic mail safety technique. Whereas this integration remains to be in progress, it displays our ongoing dedication to strengthening detection, investigation, and response capabilities throughout our surroundings. As we proceed to discover and develop sensible use circumstances, we anticipate that Splunk Enterprise Safety will develop into a key element in our total method to figuring out and mitigating email-based threats — additional future-proofing our safety posture for what’s forward.
Because the menace panorama evolves, so does Cisco. Taking these learnings, we push ahead, persevering with to innovate, combine, and strengthen our defenses to guard what issues most.
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