StrongestLayer offers AI-native email security detection & automated risk investigation

Email threat landscape shift

The company tells us that attackers now use large language models (LLMs) to craft so-called contextual phishing that evades signature-based detection. We can define contextual phishing as targeted cyber attacks using specific personal details that trick unsuspecting victims into compliance.

All the while this is happening, yet (says the company) legacy Secure Email Gateways (let’s say Proofpoint, Mimecast, Cisco IronPort, Barracuda and Symantec) continue to claim high efficacy while missing the AI-generated BEC (Business Email Compromise is a sophisticated type of cybercrime where an attacker gains access to a business email account in order to impersonate a trusted businessperson or public figure) the use of polymorphic phishing and zero-day credential harvesting attacks that cause the most damage. 

The downstream cost is severe: the average alert takes 15+ minutes to triage, 71% of SOC analysts experience burnout (Tines 2024), phishing initiates 36% of breaches (Verizon DBIR 2024), and BEC losses reached $2.9 billion in FBI-reported incidents last year.

“[Organisations today need to realise that their] email security tools are creating two problems at once: missing the threats that matter and flooding your team with noise about the ones that don’t,” said Alan LeFort, CEO of StrongestLayer. “Clear Signal ends that trade-off with better detection with less noise, instant investigation instead of manual triage,and financial evidence that makes the value undeniable to the board.”

LeFort says that Clear Signal deploys in minutes via API to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace with no MX record changes, pushing detections to Splunk, Sentinel and XSOAR (An automation platform integrating security tools to streamline incident response and management) in under five seconds.

Clear Signal 5-core platform features

Upstream Verdict Comparison runs every inbound email through StrongestLayer’s AI-native detection engine and displays the result side-by-side against the organisation’s existing Secure Email Gateway (SEG) verdict (a categorisation assigned to an email after security analysis to determine disposition), thereby giving security teams an instant, continuous audit of what their gateway missed.

Explainable AI Detection pairs every alert with natural language reasoning that details exactly why an email was flagged – threat type, attacker intent, MITRE ATT&CK mapping and confidence level. StrongestLayer says this eliminates the black-box problem common to other AI security tools.

AI Triage automates the manual research analysts currently perform – domain age checks, link detonation, sender reputation, contextual analysis – and delivers confidence-rated findings in under three seconds, collapsing average investigation time from 15 minutes to 2.3 minutes.

RATE Breach Impact Scores replace arbitrary “High/Medium/Low” severity labels with a dollar-quantified financial exposure score for every threat, grounded in FBI IC3 and Verizon DBIR (an annual report analysing global data breaches and security incident trends) loss data. This means that analysts work the highest-cost threats first.

Automated Board Reporting generates monthly executive PDFs using the FAIR risk model that translate operational metrics – time saved, false positives eliminated, threats caught – into quantified risk reduction and ROI, with zero manual assembly required.

StrongestLayer says its LLM-native cybersecurity solutions are designed for the AI era and the company’s platform combines threat detection with personalised human risk training to protect against both traditional and AI-powered email attacks.