Agari Outperforms Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Expectations; Uncovers Cybercriminals Behind COVID-19 Unemployment Fraud; Earns Industry Recognitions for Innovation

FOSTER CITY, Calif. and LONDON, Jan. 6, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Agari, the market share leader in phishing defense solutions for the enterprise, today announced performance results for its fiscal fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2020.

Highlights include:

• 33% global customer growth
• First to identify one of the cybercriminal rings behind U.S. CARES Act Fraud
• First to uncover Russian "BEC" cybercriminal ring
• Continued DMARC dominance

"Agari met or exceeded financial expectations for three consecutive quarters and for the full fiscal year, making 2020 one of the company's best years on record," said Agari founder and CEO Patrick R. Peterson. "As the COVID-19 pandemic intensified globally, email scammers accelerated their attacks and developed new threat types. Our team worked closely with customers to innovate and get out ahead of the bad actors who were moving as fast as the contagion and using pandemic-related themes to try to bilk companies, hospitals, and non-profits organizations out of money -- even attacking the vaccination supply chain."

Agari delivered on its mission: To protect digital communications to ensure humanity prevails over evil. Innovation, delighting existing customers and attracting new customers, and performing game-changing threat research that was key to Agari achieving its performance goals for the year. 

Agari Active Defense Launches

During Trust 2020, Agari's annual industry conference taking place in May, 2020, Agari formally launched a new global service, Agari Active Defense™, which is a first-of-its-kind BEC threat intelligence-based service. By December it had landed its largest customer to date, a top 10 U.S. bank. A strong pipeline indicates Agari Active Defense will play a significant role in the firm's 2021 growth.

Agari Uncovers Cybercriminal Group Behind CARES Act Scams

Using new and proprietary automated threat-hunting technology, Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) was the first to discover one of the cybercriminal rings conducting identity-deception based scams on state unemployment departments. With roots in business email compromise attacks, the "Scattered Canary" gang shifted tactics to file fraudulent Unemployment and CARES Act claims. Nearly every state unemployment process was impacted by this scam, with reported fraud losses totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Agari worked directly with law enforcement, state officials, federal agencies, and agenda-setting media to shine a bright light on COVID-19 unemployment-related identity deception fraud and how to fight back against it.

Email Security Ecosystem Recognizes Agari Innovation

Throughout 2020 the global cybersecurity industry recognized Agari's ongoing innovation for protecting companies from spear-phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and domain spoofing attacks. Honors included:

• Gold Winner for Cybersecurity Marketer of the Year – North America and Silver Winner for Best Cybersecurity Company – North America (btwn. 100-499 employees) by the 2020 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards;
• Cybersecurity Marketer of the Year – Private Company by the Cybersecurity Marketing Awards;
• A 2020 Hot 150 Cybersecurity Company, with Agari listed as the top email security company on the list by Cybercrime Magazine;
• A 50 Most Influential vendor for the IT channel on the 2020 List of Channel Chiefs by CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company;
• A 2020 Partner Program Guide company, which is the definitive listing of the most rewarding partner programs from technology companies that provide products and services through the IT channel by CRN;
• Best Security Company of the Year – over 150 staff by the Cyber Security Awards;
• Agari Brand Protection ™ took home the prize for Overall Enterprise Email Security Solution of the Year by the 2020 Cybersecurity Breakthrough Awards.

Innovation and market leadership defined the common thread weaving together these earned recognitions for Agari.

DMARC Dominance Continued

Agari is widely recognized as the pioneer of DMARC, the global standard for email authentication and the first basic step in email security. Throughout 2020 the largest companies in the world continued to choose Agari as their DMARC provider of record, because of its deep experience simplifying the journey to full enforcement or p=reject.

Today, according to independent sources, Agari protects more than 227,000 domains with 81 percent at maximum enforcement, making Agari a category leader in email authentication, helping to eliminate brand spoofing.

Innovation continued throughout 2020, with Agari announcing a key inbound DMARC protection capability. This capability delivers the CISO organization enhanced RUA visibility, increasing the confidence that important email sent from their own domains to internal addresses, including third-party SaaS services, are delivered to employee inboxes.

First Reported Russian "BEC" Cybercriminal Ring Discovered

Advanced email-based scams continue to emanate from organized crime groups based largely in Nigeria, and according to recent ACID research, 50 percent of BEC scammers operate out of the West African country. However, recent Agari research highlights Russian actors have now entered organized BEC scams. Seeing that BEC is easier to perpetrate and more profitable than malware attacks, new scammers are activating.

ACID identified "Cosmic Lynx" as the first reported Russian BEC cybercriminal organization. It targets large, multinational companies with significant global presence, employs a dual impersonation scheme with a realistic mergers and acquisition pretext, and its emails flawlessly conceived and written, making these socially-engineered scams virtually impossible for legacy security controls to detect.

Peterson added, "I'm incredibly proud that our customers, partners, investors, and employees stood by each other not just to make it through 2020 but to thrive in a time of crisis."

About Agari

Agari is the market share leader in phishing defense solutions for the enterprise. Through applied science, the Agari Identity Graph™ delivers valuable business context to every email risk decision. Agari ensures outbound email from the enterprise cannot be spoofed, increasing deliverability and preserving brand integrity. It also protects the workforce from devastating inbound BEC, VEC, spearphishing, and account takeover-based attacks, reducing business risk and restoring trust to the inbox. Learn more at agari.com.

Media Contact
Jean Creech Avent
Sr. Director, Global Corporate Communications
Agari
+1 843-986-8229
[email protected] 

SOURCE Agari

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