Abnormal AI vs. Mimecast
Abnormal is designed to analyze inbound email via API integration, ensuring broad behavioral analysis coverage across your email traffic.
The Result
Traditional Approaches Only Catch Traditional Threats
Modern email attacks rarely contain known-bad indicators of compromise that traditional threat detection relies on. 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 Protects Customers Using Behavioral AI
Our Behavioral AI works by:
- Analyzing every single post-SEG email along with over 50,000 behavioral signals.
- Our contextually rich analysis thoroughly models each account’s and vendor’s behavior.
- As a result, we detect the most subtle anomalies that signal an advanced, IOC-free socially engineered attack.
Mimecast’s Behavioral Analysis Uses A Narrow Scope
Mimecast claims to offer behavioral analysis—but their approach is fundamentally different:
- They begin by scanning messages using static rules and know-bad threat signatures.
- Next, they apply Natural Language Processing to the subset of messages flagged as anomalous.
- This limits coverage and increases the risk of missing sophisticated threats like account takeovers and vendor compromises.
Read more about how Abnormal detected invoice and vendor fraud attempts that Mimecast missed.
VIP and Internal Employee Impersonation (Without Payloads)
Abnormal is designed to detect and remediate these attacks by:
- Baseline modeling of every account's normal communication behavior.
- Using NLP and Behavioral AI to detect tone, urgency, and role-based anomalies.
- Fully automated detection and remediation across all messages.
One-to-One Spear Phishing (New Senders, No Payloads)
Abnormal is designed to detect these attacks through:
- Behavioral context, such as a never-before-seen sender.
- Identification of unexpected communication patterns.
- NLP-based detection of urgency, financial intent, or manipulation.
How Abnormal Delivers on Key Customer Needs Compared to Mimecast
Value
Mimecast SEG
Mimecast Cloud Integrated (CI)
Abnormal AI
Onboarding
Mimecast SEG
Typically multi-week setup with PS assistance
Mimecast Cloud Integrated (CI)
Typically 30-60 minutes setup (basic transport rules)
Abnormal AI
Deploys typically in under 30 seconds via API
Threat Detection
Mimecast SEG
Static rules, reputation checks, malware scans
Mimecast Cloud Integrated (CI)
Same engines as SEG; NLP applied post-CyberGraph
Abnormal AI
Behavioral AI is designed to analyze 100% of messages against dynamic user/vendor baselines
ATO Protection
Mimecast SEG
Limited; no identity signal integration
Mimecast Cloud Integrated (CI)
No detection of login anomalies or MFA changes
Abnormal AI
Behavioral AI helps detect and remediate ATOs
VEC Protection
Mimecast SEG
Spoofed domain detection via DMARC
Mimecast Cloud Integrated (CI)
Header analysis only; lacks behavioral insight
Abnormal AI
Detects compromised vendors with VendorBase™ across 3,000+ orgs
Maintenance
Mimecast SEG
Requires ongoing policy tuning
Mimecast Cloud Integrated (CI)
Minimal tuning, limited configuration
Abnormal AI
Self-learning; no rule-writing or tuning required