Additional Funding Brings Total Amount Raised by Phishing Protection Firm to $31.6 Million
College Park, MD-based phish prevention firm INKY has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners. The money will be used to consolidate recent growth and expand the company and its platform into the global market.
INKY was founded in 2008 by Dave Baggett (CEO) and Simon Smith (COO). The firm brings artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning and computer vision technology to the recognition and handling of phishing emails. Since the same social engineering methods are used for all criminal scams, INKY can be thought of as an anti-scam or forged email detection system. Forged email detection is probably more accurate, but lacks the marketing pizazz of 'anti-phishing'.
"Phishing continues to plague companies of all sizes and remains the primary vector by which attackers steal money, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information," comments Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Partners. "Despite the ever-increasing volume of phishing scams, incumbent vendors cannot solve this problem. INKY's sophisticated machine learning-based approach to identifying phishing attacks provides enterprises with an effective weapon against phishing."
For standard phishing attacks, INKY checks the validity of the sending domain, and scans the email body for indications of malicious intent. It has also introduced a novel element of computer vision analysis to check the validity of any company logos included in the email. While criminals could simply copy and paste genuine logos from source, there remain subtle indications of forgery detectable in a bit analysis. Furthermore, criminals frequently just create a quick and dirty false logo designed simply to engender trust from the target. These are easily detectable by INKY's vision analysis.
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