Five Reasons To Invest In ODD (Operational Due Diligence)

There is never a shortage of cybersecurity concerns to keep investment managers up at night. Thankfully, there is also a growing number of solutions that can tackle these cyber threats. Organizations can effectively secure their IT infrastructure, cloud operations, data, and tech gadgets, but most protective measures can quickly be rendered useless as a result of the most pervasive force afflicting cyber security: human fallibility. The question of “how secure is your organization?” can be quickly answered by reviewing and understanding the individual decisions and actions your employees make on their devices each and every day. This is especially true of employee email practices.

While training and education can eliminate a lot of the problem, it’s never 100% effective. Cybercrime tactics have become so elaborate that even the most eagle-eyed individual can be completely blindsided by sophisticated spear phishing scams. Advanced phishing techniques are elaborately customized to specifically target an organization, blending in with day-to-day activities through tactics such as C-suite impersonation. Mariner’s Bank, based in Edgewater, recently discovered that they were missing $460,000 from their accounts due to a fraudulent wire transfer. While the investigation is still ongoing, the most typical tactic that cybercriminals use is to spoof, or impersonate, email domains and insert themselves into email chain between an executive and an employee, making it extremely difficult to detect a breach.

With that in mind, we are happy to introduce our latest security partner, Inky. With Inky, clients are now provided with an added level of security to protect against email breaches and help employees better identify potential threats and nefarious activity by malicious actors. Inky is a fully-managed, cloud-hosted solution that integrates into Office365, G-Suite and other email providers, adding a layered message that immediately validates all incoming emails. In the event of a phishing threat, or another form of email attack, employees can quickly discern email scams and minimizes security breaches. Moreover, Inky’s machine learning algorithm is trained in real time from user-sourced experiences and adapts and updates itself to efficiently identify new email threats.

It’s important to note that prior to rolling out any new solutions to clients, we experiment with and stress test them internally so we can be 100% confident in our recommendations. Within the first four months of our internal testing of Inky, where it easily processed over 150K weekly incoming emails, we saw a significant reduction in number of compromising situations our employees were subjected to. While typically email attacks have a success rate of 5% to 10%, depending on sophistication of the attacker , whether it’s a wide-net attack or a targeted attack as well as quality of company’s email security defenses and a number of other factors. Inky dropped this rate to well below 1%, a substantial and impressive improvement that any organization will find beneficial.

Inky is immediately available to all current clients. If you’re not an RFA client but would like to understand how Inky implementation can help protect your business, please reach out to sales@rfa.com.