Coats is the provider of industrial thread manufacturing, with more than 17,000 employees producing enough fibre daily to stretch to the sun and back four times.
The 250-year-old company has stayed at the forefront of textile innovation as demand evolved from sewing thread to healthcare PPE and carbon composite fibres for aerospace manufacturing.
Coats leverages new technologies and market expertise to develop products for customers in the apparel, luggage, footwear, home and recreation, personal protection, transportation, telecommunications and energy industries.
Advanced email attacks
Coats—like many enterprises—faced an increase in advanced email attacks year over year.
Coats had invested in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 which was effective in blocking common email attacks by leveraging rules and policies and threat intelligence.
However, for advanced attacks they needed a solution like Abnormal Security that leverages a behavioural approach to detect and block never-seen-before attacks with high efficacy.
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Abnormal automatically reduces threat exposure and shrinks the attack surface
“We were also finding messages in quarantine that didn’t belong there and we didn’t understand why they were quarantined. The overall result was more risky messages getting through, more good messages stuck in quarantine and more time assessing why our controls weren’t stopping potentially illegitimate messages and trying to fine-tune our safelist,” said Benjamin Corll, VP of Cyber Security and Data Protection.
The result was time and attention diverted from innovation and other security priorities.
“Abnormal keeps our users from receiving advanced threat emails in their inbox, eliminating the risk of engaging in fraud or compromised messages. Abnormal automatically reduces our threat exposure and shrinks our attack surface,” said Helge Brummer, VP of Global Technology & Operations
Finding a Defence-in-Depth
“We chose Microsoft 365 to reduce our on-premises overhead, increase email system uptime and meet executives’ needs for familiar email tools,” said Albert Carreon, Head of Global Architecture.
“Microsoft Defender and Exchange Online Protection handle the basic blocking and tackling on email security to filter out messages that are known to be bad.”
The challenge
The challenge was stopping email attacks designed without malicious links or attachments to evade basic safeguards
The challenge was stopping email attacks designed without malicious links or attachments to evade basic safeguards.
The number of phishing and business email compromise messages getting through left Coats vulnerable to attacks that could cause extensive damage.
Coats knew it needed to layer another solution onto its Microsoft controls.
Traditional secure email gateways
“We looked at traditional secure email gateways (SEGs), but their protections were similar to what Microsoft was doing,” Corll said.
“We needed a powerful, modern, behaviour-based solution that was designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft. Abnormal Security’s Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) platform was the right choice. ICES uses ML and AI to evaluate behaviour and content,” Corll said.
“Since we turned on ICES in the past year, we have not experienced a single compromised account.”
Securing Email Communication
Coats operates in 55 countries, supplying more than 1,000 customers
Coats operates in 55 countries, supplying more than 1,000 customers who make items ranging from jeans, luggage and mattresses to firefighter gear, fibre optic cables, vehicle airbags and smartphones.
Because Coats and its customers have such complex supply chains, Coats Digital developed its own agile, sustainable supply chain solution for fashion manufacturers and brands.
Preventing supply chain compromise
Preventing supply chain compromise is a critical component of maintaining security and trust across the Coats ecosystem. Upon implementation, Abnormal’s AI-driven VendorBase identified Coats’ 7,099 vendors and evaluated their messages for potential compromise, based on each vendor’s legitimacy, history of compromise and history of impersonation attempts at Coats and across all Abnormal customers.
The behavioural analysis within VendorBase found 30 vendors at high risk, another 20 at medium risk and 33 attacks from legitimate vendor and partner accounts.
Based on the results, “Abnormal showed that it’s a robust defence-in-depth solution with unparalleled vendor analysis,” Corll said.
