The Challenge
- Protect manufacturing processes and infrastructure from email threats
- Prevent business email compromise attacks from impacting leaders
- Strengthen culture of security throughout organization
The Solution
- Proofpoint Threat Protection (Email Security)
- Proofpoint Email Fraud Defense
- Proofpoint ZenGuide™ (security awareness)
The Results
- Proofpoint Threat Protection detects and stops BEC, ransomware and other threats
- Proofpoint Email Fraud Defense (EFD) protects brand reputation
- Proofpoint ZenGuide keeps employees informed, engaged and resilient
The Challenge
Keeping Manufacturing Operations Secure
Since 1967, TEAM Industries has been a one-stop outsourcing partner, providing capabilities like design, R&D, engineering, testing, vertically integrated manufacturing and assembly. More than 1,200 employees operate from eight facilities with over 1,000,000 square feet of manufacturing and office space.
Smooth, secure communication is critical for keeping all these vast sites running at their best, because a single malicious attack could spread throughout the organization and impact operations. However, like most organizations, TEAM Industries faces a growing volume of threats, even as it continually upgrades and modernizes its email and applications security protocols.
“We migrated from Microsoft Exchange running on premises with about eight different mail servers, to Microsoft 365,” said Jason Morton, senior network engineer/IT manager at TEAM Industries. “During that period, we went from receiving almost no spam to getting hammered with spam and ransomware threats.”
Business email compromise (BEC) attacks were also increasing in frequency and intensity, impersonating suppliers to deceive executives and people from the supply chain department into making fraudulent financial payments.
“Our CFO and even our CEO were receiving impersonation emails,” said Morton. “At one point, our director of supply chain was receiving about 100 fraudulent emails each day.”
As the attacks continued to escalate, Morton and his team saw the need to move proactively to strengthen email security, while improving its company culture by educating and motivating employees to embrace security best practices.
Jason Morton, senior network engineer/IT manager, TEAM Industries
The Solution
A Multifaceted Approach to Security
“We signed up for a trial of Proofpoint Threat Protection, then we got involved with the Proofpoint security awareness solution,” said Lannie Husom, network administrator at TEAM Industries. “We also added Proofpoint Email Fraud Defense (EFD), and implementing it was a very smooth process.”
Proofpoint Threat Protection enables the organization to capture both known and unknown threats, supported by Proofpoint Nexus®, which is a comprehensive threat intelligence platform powered by AI, machine learning and real-time threat intelligence. It accurately detects and blocks threats, and the granular filtering capabilities help the organization stop spam and other unwanted email.
To further reduce impostor threats and brand abuse in BEC attacks, TEAM Industries also deployed Proofpoint EFD. Through guided workflows and support from dedicated consultants, the solution helps the organization streamline its Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) implementation to protect its reputation from email fraud attacks. It also provides an additional layer of protection against BEC scams.
Proofpoint ZenGuide™ provides security education that complements the company’s technology tools. It helps the IT team keep employees informed about the trending threats and how best to handle potentially risky communications. And it empowers them to take action right away.
“User awareness of security is huge since we have deployed the Proofpoint security awareness solution,” said Husom. “Proofpoint empowers our users with the daily digest and ability to report suspicious email. It gives them the ability to identify potential phish and make mindful decisions. And nine times out of ten, they know better than we might if an email is legitimate or a threat.”
The Results
Strengthening Best Practices and Compliance
The comprehensive Proofpoint solution has helped TEAM Industries keep pace with the latest threats, and has already proven its ability to stop malicious messages from impacting the company’s network—and its manufacturing processes.
“The threat landscape is changing fast, and we read enough technology bulletins to know that emerging threats are too. We need to keep our people up to speed on them,” said Husom. “I’ve seen firsthand that Proofpoint solutions and training have prevented a large number of issues we could have had in our system that never made it through, because people reported them or Proofpoint either stopped or quarantined them.”
Proofpoint helps Morton and Husom save time investigating email threats, so they can focus on more important priorities for the entire business.
“When we rolled out Exchange a few years ago, employees considered me an expert in suspicious email,” said Morton. “People would forward suspicious-looking messages to me, and it consumed a good chunk of my day having to reply. After going to Proofpoint and giving our users the ability to report suspicious email, I still get a few questions here or there, but 99 percent of them went away. This has been fantastic, saving me a lot of time and allowing me to focus on other things.”
“In the end, Proofpoint is a fairly low-maintenance solution,” added Husom. “We’ll pull up and check the logs and look over a few metrics, but operating it is hands-off in most regards.”
The solution has also helped TEAM Industries improve its overall security posture, to better meet compliance requirements posed by its customers.
“We definitely faced some compliance drivers, and we have to do security surveys for some of our larger customers on an annual basis,” said Morton, “It’s always good to inform them we can meet their requirements. We can tell them that we have hosted Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), as well as hosted Sender Policy Framework (SPF). We are also at full p=reject in DMARC, a robust policy to stop malicious emails from spoofing our domains.”
Proofpoint Professional Services has been helpful as well, working closely with the IT team to tailor the solution to meet specific challenges.
“We had an interesting case where we had a user placed on an email spam bot list, and he started receiving thousands of messages a minute,” said Morton. “It was almost like an email DDoS attack. My colleague, Lannie, got on the phone with Proofpoint Professional Services, and they quickly wrote a rule that would unsubscribe it in multiple languages. That user hasn’t received a single spam from the bot since then.”
With its robust combination of advanced technology and best practices training from Proofpoint, TEAM Industries has gained an advantage in stopping email threats before they pose risk to the company—while protecting its core operations, its customers and its brand reputation.
