Revolution Medicines Guards Its Cancer Research and Patients With Abnormal

Revolution Medicines (RevMed) is on target to outsmart some of the hardest-to-treat cancers. The Redwood City, California-based company researches and develops RAS(ON) inhibitors to provide more effective therapeutic options for patients with treatment-resistant RAS-addicted cancers, such as non-small cell lung cancer and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. With roughly 30% of all new cancer diagnoses tied to RAS mutations, the potential impact of RevMed’s work is significant.

"Threats in our landscape include intellectual property and financial theft, and attackers impersonating patients to target their data, which could compromise their treatment as well," said Alec Lessard, Senior Manager of Information Security. RevMed used Microsoft 365's native security tools plus a legacy SEG for email protection, but. the SEG required manual maintenance and often missed advanced threats and spam while generating false positives. "Our operations team was always getting reports, adding senders and IP addresses to lists, and responding to users," said Carlos Escobar, VP of Information Security. The results were inefficiencies, disruptions, and a reactive rather than proactive email security posture.

“Abnormal is different because of the value of its AI solution and because of the relationship. From the start, the Abnormal team has collaborated with us, first on the easy setup and since then on using the platform to ensure that we're meeting our objectives.”
—Carlos Escobar, VP of Information Security

RevMed wanted to replace their SEG with an intelligent autonomous solution to reduce the SOC team's workload, save users time, and reduce the risk of employees engaging with attacks. "We looked for an AI-based solution to combat AI-enabled attacks and allow our users to receive only the messages they need," said Escobar. Abnormal AI fit the requirements, and its API-based design ensured that it integrated easily with CrowdStrike, which RevMed uses. "Knowing there's a synergistic communication between Abnormal and CrowdStrike gave us peace of mind that there's going to be a managed solution and managed team, as well as our internal SOC, looking into any account takeover," said Lessard.

RevMed's proof of value with Abnormal was convincing. "There were surprises, mainly the amount of information our SEG was not capturing and the amount of information that we got from the platform about emails that were captured and whether they were malicious, spam, or graymail," Escobar said. With Abnormal keeping attacks and spam out of users inboxes and filtering graymail, the entire company is more secure and more efficient. "Abnormal saves us in labor costs and in time that we would've had to spend researching and administering additional controls to protect our email ecosystem," Lessard said.

Escobar sees additional value in how Abnormal future-proofs RevMed’s security. "Abnormal can help us with future use cases because it's AI-based and will continue to learn about new threats, new adversaries, and the total email threat landscape," he added.

“With the SEG, there were so many repetitive maintenance tasks. Abnormal saves our SOC a substantial amount of time, so our analysts now do a lot of proactive threat hunting. Our environment is safer and we have a greater chance of catching threats in the act instead of after attacks.”
—Alec Lessard, Senior Manager of Information Security

Abnormal has helped RevMed move beyond their SEG to attain a proactive security posture that echoes the company's approach to tackling difficult cancer treatment challenges. "Abnormal lets us focus on how our threat management, risk management, and compliance can better align with RevMed's business processes and goals as the company grows and expands," Escobar said. Abnormal also lets researchers and other employees stop worrying about their inbox and the safety of their data, so they can focus on seeking new ways to treat tough cancers.