ServiceNow Partner Thirdera’s New Service Automates Phishing Responses

“If someone reports a suspicious email, Attentive automates the lookup of sources to see if is malicious, may detonate the attack in a ‘sandbox’” via a third-party technology, and then pass the information to an admin who can tell in 90 seconds if it is malicious. It then looks across all providers to see who else opened the message. And this is all done across the entire organization with ServiceNow,” says Josh Tessaro, Thirdera’s global lead for security and risk.

Elite-level ServiceNow channel partner Thirdera Tuesday unveiled Attentive: Advanced Phishing Response, a new service the company said is ServiceNow-certified for automating the management of phishing incidents.

ServiceNow already has a wide range of security-related offerings, including attack surface handling and SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) platform that includes incident response, said Josh Tessaro, global lead for security and risk at Broomfield, Colo.-based Thirdera.

Thirdera, a solution provider focused exclusively on ServiceNow, takes what the vendor has done a step further with its Attentive: Advanced Phishing Response offering, Tessaro told CRN.

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Attentive is a new offering that adds Thirdera’s own intellectual property and best practices to ServiceNow’s platform, said Tessaro.

“Almost all business customers have some type of email and spam filtering,” he said. “But spam in ‘grey mail,’ or emails that may not be malicious, and phishing often gets through the filters. So scanning may not catch everything.”

Attentive helps automate the response to phishing attacks that do get through, Tessaro said.

“If an attack gets through the filtering, an admin has to look at it, and may detonate it in a ‘sandbox,’ to see if it’s malicious,” he said. “If it’s malicious, he or she will reach out to the email team to see if any other employees are impacted. All together, this may require four to 11 different manual tools. And some users may not even report an incident.”

Thirdera wanted to automate that process, and developed Attentive, Tessaro said.

“With things like phishing, it’s easy to show ROI (return on investment),” he said. “We help show customers here’s what can be automated. Organizations have 25 to 40 security tools, each with 12 to 20 potential vendors. We help them understand what they have, what tools could be used, put the tools together, and add automation.”

Attentive: Advanced Phishing Response adds automation to the entire process, Tessaro said.

“If someone reports a suspicious email, Attentive automates the lookup of sources to see if is malicious, may detonate the attack in a ‘sandbox’ via a third-party technology, and then pass the information to an admin who can tell in 90 seconds if it is malicious,” he said. “It then looks across all providers to see who else opened the message. And this is all done across the entire organization with ServiceNow.”

Customers using Attentive are seeing up to a 95 percent reduction in manual tasks and up to an 87 percent decrease in cycle times, which is a measurement of when issues are reported as fixed, Tessaro said.

This kind of automation has not really been done before for a very good reason, he said.

“This is very complex technology,” he said. “You need to deal with hundreds of new technologies every year, or use a platform like ServiceNow which is built for this kind of automation. We’re building on ServiceNow’s Security Incident Response offering, either the professional or enterprise version. We come in, do the discovery via conversations with the customers, provide a roadmap, and help with the implementation.”

Thirdera’s Attentive: Advanced Phishing Response solution is certified by ServiceNow, and is listed on the ServiceNow Store, Tessaro said