Purpose-Built Email Security

Abnormal AI vs. Darktrace

Abnormal AI was engineered from the ground up to secure the email environment—no bolt-ons required. Our native API architecture enables seamless integration, while powering precise, automated threat detection and response.

The Result

Faster Protection Against Advanced Attacks That Others Often Miss

Advanced Protection Requires Deep Behavioral Analysis

Modern email attacks rarely contain known-bad indicators of compromise. Instead, cybercriminals are exploiting trust, legitimate infrastructure, and security blind spots through socially engineered attacks. Abnormal has witnessed threat actors:

Use QR codes and social engineering, not payloads.
Launch attacks from compromised internal and vendor accounts.
Abuse OAuth tokens and bypass MFA.

Abnormal's Architecture Enhances Threat Detection

Abnormal’s API-native architecture is a foundational advantage in how we protect our customers because:

It provides seamless protection, streamline operations, and remediates before user interaction.
It powers our Behavioral AI, which ingests over 50,000 signals across email content, identity data, SaaS activity, and communication patterns.
It allows for comprehensive analysis which understands normal communication patterns for each account—enabling precise detection of even the most subtle and sophisticated threats.

Darktrace’s Architecture Can Put Accounts At Risk

Darktrace encourages customers to use a partial API architecture with journaling, which:

Differs from the Pure API architecture that the prospect experienced during Proof of Value.
Can create processing delays during high email volumes which then delays threat remediation.
Can raise privacy concerns because journaling requires the vendor to store every customer email for weeks at a time.

Source 01, Source 02 and Source 03

Abnormal’s Advanced Protection

Internal Account Takeover (ATO)

Abnormal is designed to automatically detect and remediate internal account takeovers by:

Monitoring login patterns and identity metadata via Microsoft Graph API.
Flagging suspicious inbox rule changes or MFA updates.
Revoking sessions, triggering password resets, and notifying admins—all without SOC involvement.

Darktrace does not provide full autonomous remediation for anomalous logins out-of-the-box; it relies on Microsoft logs for visibility and requires additional paid modules (like Darktrace/Identity) for those capabilities.

Source

Vendor Email Compromise (VEC)

Abnormal’s VendorBase™ uses federated intelligence from 3,000+ customers to:

Baseline normal vendor communication.
Detect indicators of suspicious financial requests (e.g., sudden banking changes.)
Identify impersonation attempts—even when SPF, DKIM, and DMARC pass.

Darktrace lacks federated vendor intelligence and instead relies on detecting anomalies in vendor behavior only within the customer’s own environment. Source

How Abnormal Delivers on Key Customer Needs Compared to Darktrace