Solving Email Security For Modern Threats

How We're Solving Email Security For Modern Threats: Managed Protection with Sublime Security

From reactive defense to proactive protection

In my previous post, I outlined why traditional email security approaches struggle against today's threat. The gap between universal platform protections and targeted attacks, the inability to customize defenses quickly, and the lack of visibility into post-delivery threats.

This post walks through how we've addressed these gaps with our Managed Email Protection service, built on the Sublime Security platform for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments.

The Architectural Foundation: API-Driven Protection

The fundamental difference between legacy email gateways and modern solutions like Sublime is where and how they operate.

Traditional gateways sit in front of your email infrastructure, inspecting messages in transit. Sublime connects directly to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace via API, operating as a native extension of your email platform rather than an external filter.

What this architectural approach enables:

Complete mailbox visibility. Sublime analyzes not just incoming emails, but mailbox rules, forwarding configurations, login patterns, and historical communication baselines. When an attacker compromises an account and creates a forwarding rule or manipulates mailbox settings, the system detects it immediately.

Post-delivery analysis and remediation. Messages are continuously monitored even after delivery. If a previously clean URL becomes malicious, or if new intelligence reveals a sender's credentials were compromised, Sublime automatically quarantines messages from all affected mailboxes—even days after initial delivery.

Context-aware detection. By accessing your email environment directly, Sublime understands your organization's communication patterns, vendor relationships, and normal behavior. This contextual awareness enables detection of anomalies that would appear normal in generic rulesets designed for millions of organizations.

Beyond Platform Detection: The Managed Service Advantage

While the Sublime platform provides powerful detection capabilities, the real value lies in how we deliver it as a fully managed service. This eliminates the operational burden that comes with advanced security tools.

What managed protection means in practice:

Expert-led threat investigation. Our security analysts review high-risk alerts and suspicious patterns, providing human context to automated detection. This eliminates false positives that would otherwise disrupt your business operations while ensuring real threats receive immediate attention.

Continuous optimization and tuning. We monitor your environment's communication patterns, supplier relationships, and workflows, then continuously tune detection logic to match your specific context. As your business evolves, your protection adapts automatically without requiring internal resources.

Guided response and incident handling. When threats are detected, our team handles the remediation—inbox cleanup, sender blocking, threat neutralization. For account-related incidents like suspicious forwarding rules or credential compromise, we provide expert-driven response and coordinate with your IT team as needed.

24/7 monitoring without expanding your team. You get enterprise-level security operations without hiring additional SOC analysts or expanding your internal security team.

Real-World Protection Scenarios

Here are actual attack types we're stopping for our customers that bypass native Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace protections:

Supplier invoice fraud. An attacker distributes fraudulent invoices disguised as legitimate supplier documents. Sublime's behavioral analysis flags unusual sender patterns and metadata inconsistencies that indicate the invoice is fraudulent, even when the content appears legitimate. The message is quarantined before reaching finance teams.

AI-enhanced executive impersonation. Attackers use AI to craft convincing emails mimicking your CFO's communication style, complete with context from LinkedIn and public company information. Sublime detects the mismatch between content patterns and sender authentication, validates the threat using behavioral signals, and removes the message automatically.

QR code phishing. Attackers embed malicious QR codes in images directing users to credential harvesting pages. Traditional filters don't inspect image content, but Sublime analyzes images for QR codes, decodes the embedded URLs, inspects the destinations, and quarantines messages containing malicious links.

Account takeover and internal abuse. After compromising a user account through credential theft, attackers use the legitimate mailbox to launch internal phishing campaigns. Sublime detects unusual sending patterns—higher volume than typical, messages to recipients outside normal communication circles, suspicious content patterns—and isolates the compromised account before widespread damage occurs.

OAuth consent phishing. Users receive emails directing them to grant OAuth permissions to malicious applications disguised as legitimate services. Sublime identifies the consent flow abuse, flags applications not on your approved list requesting sensitive permissions, and blocks the attack before tokens are issued.

The Operational Impact: What IT Leaders Actually Get

Deploying our Managed Email Protection service delivers concrete operational benefits beyond just blocking threats:

Elimination of alert fatigue. Our customers report immediate reduction in SOC noise and false positives. One manufacturing client with 10,000 daily emails achieved 100% removal of malicious messages while eliminating manual rule management entirely. Their IT team was freed from constant triage and maintenance.

Zero maintenance burden. You don't write rules, tune detection logic, or update threat patterns. We handle all ongoing optimization based on emerging threats and your evolving communication patterns. One enterprise client with 1.6 million monthly emails eliminated their entire email security maintenance workload.

Rapid threat adaptation. When we identify a new attack pattern targeting your industry or organization, we deploy custom detection rules within hours. You're not waiting for platform vendors to add protections to their universal ruleset that serves millions of organizations.

Complete visibility without complexity. You get full dashboard access showing detected threats, trends, and risk indicators. Executive-ready reporting provides clear visibility into your security posture without requiring deep technical expertise.

Integration With Your Security Ecosystem

Our service doesn't operate in isolation. We integrate with your existing security infrastructure to provide unified visibility and coordinated response:

SIEM and SOC integration. Email security events flow into your security monitoring platforms alongside endpoint, network, and identity telemetry. Your analysts see email-based credential harvesting attempts in the same timeline as suspicious authentication and lateral movement.

SOAR and automated response workflows. When threats are detected, automated playbooks can trigger immediate actions—disabling compromised accounts, revoking sessions, notifying affected users, or escalating to analysts based on severity thresholds.

Identity and access management correlation. We correlate email-based threats with authentication patterns, enabling detection of coordinated attacks that span multiple systems. When credential harvesting is detected, we can immediately assess whether authentication attempts using those credentials have occurred.

Industry-Specific Protection

Different industries face different email threat profiles. Our managed service adapts to your sector's specific risks:

Financial services face sophisticated BEC attacks targeting wire transfers and account management workflows. We implement enhanced behavioral detection for payment-related communications and strict verification protocols for account changes.

Manufacturing and distribution encounter supplier impersonation and purchase order manipulation. We establish baseline communication patterns for your vendor ecosystem and flag deviations that indicate compromise or fraud.

Professional services dealing with client data see targeted credential theft and client impersonation. We monitor for abnormal access patterns and communication with external parties that deviate from established relationships.

Healthcare organizations face patient data theft attempts and insurance fraud channels. We implement specialized detection for HIPAA-sensitive communications and healthcare-specific social engineering tactics.

The Numbers: Measured Impact

Our customers see measurable operational improvements:

A mid-sized manufacturing group with 400 mailboxes processing 10,000 daily emails achieved 100% malicious email removal while eliminating all manual rule management and alert oversight. Their IT team was freed entirely from email security maintenance.

An international enterprise with 600+ mailboxes and 1.6 million monthly emails saw advanced phishing and supplier-domain compromises stopped in real-time, with immediate reduction in SOC noise and complete elimination of false positives impacting business operations.

Beyond prevented incidents, customers report significant ROI through reduced operational costs—elimination of rule maintenance, decreased helpdesk load from phishing attempts, and recovered end-user productivity from fewer security disruptions.

Why Managed Service Matters

The challenge with advanced email security platforms isn't just deploying the technology—it's operating it effectively. Sophisticated detection requires:

Continuous tuning to match your organization's communication patterns and business processes. Generic rules won't catch attacks designed specifically for your environment.

Expert interpretation to distinguish true threats from legitimate but unusual business activity. False positives disrupt operations; missed threats cause breaches.

Rapid response when threats are detected. The window between detection and damage is often measured in minutes, not hours.

Ongoing optimization as threat actors evolve their tactics and your organization changes. Detection logic that worked last quarter may miss today's attacks.

Most organizations lack the specialized expertise, time, or resources to operate advanced email security effectively. That's where our managed service delivers value—you get enterprise-level security operations without building an internal team.

Service Tiers: Core and Complete

We offer two service levels to match different organizational needs:

Managed Email Protection - CORE provides the full Sublime platform with automated detection and remediation, continuous updates, behavioral analysis, and expert-led support during business hours. This tier is ideal for organizations seeking modern, threat-adaptive protection with zero operational burden.

Managed Email Protection - COMPLETE adds 24/7 expert-led threat investigation, guided incident response, proactive threat hunting, continuous optimization tailored to your environment, and priority analyst support. This tier suits organizations requiring comprehensive managed security operations with human expertise backing every decision.

Both tiers eliminate maintenance requirements, integrate with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace via API, and forward alerts to customer SIEM/SOC systems for unified visibility.

Getting Started

Deployment is straightforward and non-disruptive. The API-based integration requires no MX record changes and typically takes less than 10 minutes of IT effort. We can activate a 30-day trial providing complete visibility into threats currently bypassing your existing protections—no risk, no commitment.

During the trial, you'll see exactly what's getting through your current defenses and how our managed service addresses those gaps. Most organizations are surprised by the sophisticated attacks landing in their environment that native protections miss entirely.

The Bottom Line

Email remains your biggest attack surface. Modern threats bypass traditional filters through AI-enhanced social engineering, targeted business context, and sophisticated identity abuse. Platform-native protections cannot adapt quickly enough to organization-specific attacks, and internal teams lack the bandwidth to operate advanced security tools effectively.

Our Managed Email Protection service closes these gaps by combining the advanced detection capabilities of Sublime Security with expert-led security operations. You get enterprise-level protection without enterprise-level overhead—fully managed, continuously optimized, and integrated with your existing security infrastructure.

The question isn't whether you need better email security—it's whether your current approach is actually stopping the threats hitting your inbox today, and whether you have the resources to operate advanced protection effectively.

Ready to see what threats are bypassing your current email security? We offer free 30-day trials with complete visibility into real threats in your environment. Schedule a demo to get started, or reach out to discuss your specific security requirements.