CrowdStrike announced that its strategic investment vehicle, the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund, has invested in Abnormal Security, the leading behavioral AI-based email security platform.
As part of the investment, CrowdStrike and Abnormal are also entering into a strategic technology partnership that integrates the CrowdStrike Falcon platform with the Abnormal platform to offer best-in-class email and endpoint attack detection and response with automated account remediation. As part of this partnership, Abnormal has also joined the CrowdXDR Alliance and the two companies will plan to bring an XDR integration to market.
“As a former CISO responsible for protecting hundreds of thousands of employees, I observed that attacks were increasingly becoming multi-channel, and this trend has grown exponentially in recent years,” said Stephen Ward, managing director at Insight Partners. “It’s exciting to see two market leaders, Abnormal Security and CrowdStrike, come together to forge a strategic partnership and deliver a powerful XDR-driven integration. I’m confident that this partnership can help organizations stop sophisticated attacks across a broad surface area and allow security leaders to get the most from their current solutions.”
The initial technology integration between Abnormal and CrowdStrike delivers bi-directional threat detection and response. When the CrowdStrike Falcon platform detects risk, an account takeover case is automatically created within the Abnormal platform. Security analysts, or autonomous policies, can then take rapid action: forcing step-up authentication, logging out users, terminating sessions or mandating a password reset. Alternatively, when Abnormal detects a compromised email account, a real-time alert automatically adds the targeted user to the Falcon Watched Users list for re-authentication and investigation.
“Email and endpoint devices are highly attacked entry points into an organization, and while rapid detection and response is key, it has been limited by the manual effort required to integrate siloed data from multiple solutions,” said Evan Reiser, co-founder and chief executive officer at Abnormal Security. “I’m thrilled about this investment from CrowdStrike and the partnership between our two market-defining businesses, as we break down data silos and deliver consolidated solutions for the XDR era.”
The CrowdStrike Falcon Fund is a cross-stage investment fund and the largest corporate venture arm in the cybersecurity industry. The program is designed to build an ecosystem of next-generation security leaders that share a common mission through a unique combination of investment and deep technical integrations with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, giving CrowdStrike customers access to cutting-edge third-party capabilities.
“The premise of the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund is to invest in companies that are redefining key security categories and protecting customers against adversaries operating on evolving attack paths. Abnormal Security’s innovative risk-aware, AI-based security platform offers high-efficacy protection against sophisticated email attacks and automatic remediation of compromised accounts, making them both an attractive investment and technology partner,” said Michael Sentonas, president at CrowdStrike. “Their behavioral AI vision is closely aligned with CrowdStrike’s AI/ML approach to cybersecurity and we look forward to closely partnering with them to take on modern adversaries and stop breaches.”
Customer Validation
“Comfort Systems USA builds, supports and maintains our customers’ most critical building systems,” said Christopher Chambers, vice president of information security at Comfort Systems USA. “I’m excited to see Abnormal and CrowdStrike working together to protect our employees against the types of attacks traditional solutions often fail to detect. With the ability to correlate user behavior events across endpoints, email and authentication sources, our security team can quickly uncover account takeover attacks and take preventative measures.”
“The enhanced, integrated offerings from CrowdStrike and Abnormal further strengthen our security infrastructure and quickly orchestrate responses,” said Drew Robertson, chief information security officer at Finance of America Companies. “These solutions provide enhanced protection for our organization, as well as significant time savings and process efficiencies.”
