Key takeaways
- Included with Collaboration Security Prime, the Threat Interaction Map brings together detection, response, and visibility into a single dashboard.
- See the complete attack story across channels and stages—not just isolated alerts.
- Accelerate response and reduce dwell time with instant context that helps prioritize investigation.
The invisible problem: when protection isn't enough
Here's an uncomfortable truth that keeps security leaders up at night: You can deploy best-in-class protection across every channel and still lack the confidence that you're truly secure.
Why? Because today's most sophisticated attacks don't live in a single domain. They're multichannel and multistage by design—starting with a compromised supplier account that’s used to launch a phishing attack, pivoting via Microsoft Teams to compromise an employee account, establishing persistence via multifactor (MFA) manipulation, and ultimately exfiltrating data through a cloud application. Each stage may be detected by a different tool. And each tool generates a separate alert in a console that isn’t connected to the others.
The result is a dangerous blind spot. Your security stack may be stopping individual threats. However, without clear visibility into the complete attacker lifecycle, you can't know what you're missing. Protection without visibility is protection you can’t believe in.
In other words, you can't confidently answer the questions that matter most:
- Is the same attacker targeting multiple employees across different communication channels?
- Did the attacker successfully pivot after the initial compromise?
- Which trusted relationships—suppliers, partners, even AI agents—are being exploited?
- What did our automated controls stop? And what requires immediate human intervention?
- How far did this attack spread across our collaboration ecosystem?
As organizations embrace the agentic workspace—where AI assistants and autonomous agents work alongside people across email, collaboration platforms, and cloud environments—this challenge intensifies. That’s because the attack surface expands, trusted relationships multiply, and successful attacks spread at machine speed. And at the same time, an attacker's ability to move laterally through your environment accelerates.
A new approach: unified visibility across the attack chain
To combat this challenge, we're introducing the Threat Interaction Map. Integrated within the Threat Protection Workbench, which is part of Proofpoint Collaboration Security Prime, this breakthrough capability transforms how security teams understand, investigate, and respond to modern multichannel, multistage attacks.
The Threat Interaction Map doesn't just detect single threats. It provides the entire attack story. It does this by correlating security events across your complete collaboration ecosystem, including:
- Email or cloud accounts
- Collaboration platforms
- Supplier relationships
- User clicks
- Third-party security tool integrations, such as Microsoft Defender or Crowdstrike Falcon
As a result, security operations center (SOC) analysts and security leaders get a single, intuitive visual timeline where everything is in one place. They see:
The source
Where did the attack originate? Was it a compromised supplier account? A malicious domain? An AI-generated phishing lure? The Threat Interaction Map identifies the initial vector and shows whether trusted relationships are being exploited.
The path
What did the attacker do next? After compromising an account, did they create malicious mailbox rules? Access sensitive files in SharePoint? Send follow-on attacks via Teams? The map traces lateral movement across channels in real time.
The exposure
Which users, data, or systems are exposed? The Threat Interaction Map connects the dots between initial compromise and potential business impact, helping you understand true exposure before damage occurs.
The response
What did Proofpoint—and integrated third-party controls like Microsoft Defender or CrowdStrike Falcon—already stop? Which malicious sessions were terminated, which emails were remediated, and which threats were blocked at the endpoint or click-time? Critically, what needs further investigation from your team? The map provides clear separation between resolved threats and active incidents.
Figure 1. Example of a compromised supplier investigation via the Threat Interaction Map.
Why this changes everything
Below are a few of the benefits of the Threat Interaction Map.
1: Gain confidence through clarity
When you can visualize the complete attack lifecycle—from initial compromise through attempted pivots and automated response—you gain something that’s invaluable: confidence. You know that you're protected against even the most sophisticated threats.
The Threat Interaction Map connects Collaboration Security Prime capabilities across channels and stages into a unified view. It helps your SOC analysts understand the relationship between events. And it helps them know with certainty that your defenses are working as intended across the entire attack chain.
2: Accelerate threat response, reduce dwell time
Time is the enemy in modern incident response. The longer an attacker dwells in your environment, the greater the damage.
The Threat Interaction Map collapses investigation time from hours to minutes by providing instant context. SOC analysts no longer need to hunt across multiple consoles, manually correlating events or reconstructing timelines. The complete story is immediately visible. As a result, they can make decisions faster.
Real-world impact: Organizations that use Proofpoint Collaboration Security Prime report a 75% improvement in workforce efficiency across investigation and remediation tasks.
"If responding to something used to take us two hours, automation now brings that down to seconds." — Proofpoint Enterprise Prime Customer
By accelerating detection and response, organizations dramatically reduce attacker dwell time. This limits an attacker’s window of opportunity for data exfiltration and lateral movement—and helps you avoid business disruption.
3: Get instant context for intelligent prioritization
Not all security events demand the same level of urgency. The challenge for overwhelmed SOC teams is quickly and accurately separating critical incidents from noise.
The Threat Interaction Map provides instant context to solve this challenge. When an alert fires, analysts can immediately see:
- Whether this is an isolated event or part of a broader campaign
- What other users or systems are affected
- Whether automated controls have already contained the threat
This contextual intelligence enables intelligent prioritization. Your team focuses on what truly matters: active threats that require a human to intervene. They don’t get sidetracked investigating false positives or threats that have already been neutralized by automation.
The future of security operations
The Threat Interaction Map represents a fundamental shift in how organizations approach security operations. It moves beyond isolated threat detection to unified threat intelligence, connecting the dots across your entire collaboration ecosystem.
It’s a capability that’s designed for the modern threat landscape. You get:
- Multichannel visibility across email and—at higher tiers—messaging, collaboration, compromised accounts, and supplier activity
- Multistage correlation that connects attack signals and maps how threats progress end-to-end
- Analyst-focused context that reduces investigation time by grouping related events and entities
- Unified threat view that replaces siloed alerts with a connected understanding of campaigns and risk exposure
- Insight into remediation outcomes, showing how actions (e.g., ATO containment) impacted the threat
As attacks grow more sophisticated and the agentic workspace expands, this level of visibility is essential.
Experience the Threat Interaction Map
The Threat Interaction Map is available now as part of Proofpoint Collaboration Security Prime. Organizations using Prime get immediate access to this breakthrough capability, along with the industry's most comprehensive protection against multichannel, multistage attacks.
Take a test drive of the Threat Interaction Map here or if you’re ready to gain true confidence in your defenses, schedule a demo today.