Proofpoint bets on APAC growth amid spike in AI-driven threats

Proofpoint is expanding its footprint in Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), aiming for growth of up to four times that of its global business as it responds to a threat landscape supercharged by artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency.

The company has established a larger Singapore office, which also serves as a customer innovation centre to showcase its technology. It recently launched its first office in India and expanded its headcount in the region by 20%.

George Lee, Proofpoint’s senior vice-president for APJ, said the company is “very bullish on the whole region”, where its business is currently growing three times faster than its global business, fuelled by a shift in the nature of cyber threats.

“From a threat perspective, a lot of threats we see are traditionally English-based,” Lee said. “But because of the proliferation of generative AI, there’s no badly written email anymore. Every phishing email looks like a legitimate email.”

This is particularly acute in Japan, where language was once a deterrent for attackers. “In the past 18 months, we’ve seen a huge spike of attacks in non-English speaking markets, particularly Japan,” Lee noted, adding that cryptocurrencies have also made it easier for attackers to monetise activities such as ransomware.

Jennifer Cheng, Proofpoint’s director for cyber security strategy in the region, noted the scale of the problem: “We’ve seen over 119% increase in URL-based threats in email in the past three years, and over 2,000% increase in URL threats in SMS messages during the same period.” 

Cheng said the core of Proofpoint’s strategy is to tackle cyber security in a “human-centric way”, noting that while technology and data are crucial, human behaviour remains the unpredictable factor that attackers continue to exploit.

Lee said that attackers are increasingly targeting vulnerable and curious human users to gain access to valuable corporate data. Proofpoint’s platform aims to prevent such threats by analysing intent and context, rather than depend solely on categorisation and tagging in traditional data loss prevention measures.

“If I am asked to wake up at four in the morning to download some documentation, then clearly something is wrong,” Lee offered as a simple example of detecting such risks in real-time through Proofpoint’s platform, which leverages purpose-built AI and machine learning models trained on telemetry data from a quarter of the world’s email traffic.

Cheng said this AI-driven approach will help counter modern evasion tactics that bypass older, signature-based systems, with attackers now using images or QR codes that point victims to malicious sites. AI, she added, will help organisations detect, analyse and extract URLs and malicious content from these visual-based threats.

Another evolving tactic Cheng identified is “subscription bombing”, where an attacker inundates a user’s inbox with legitimate-looking subscription emails, such as a password reset email for a compromised account, to hide a more sinister action.

“If you were just looking at things like reputation, signatures and traditional measures like filtering, and don’t have something like AI to understand email traffic or behaviour and intent, then you’re not going to be able to catch or stop those threats,” she said.

Looking ahead, Lee warned that the next frontier of cyber security will involve agentic AI. As companies deploy AI agents to handle more mundane tasks, these digital workers, which will have access to corporate data, will be increasingly targeted by threat actors.

“We believe prompt engineering is the next phase of risk as agentic AI develops,” Lee said, noting that Proofpoint is focused on inspecting the interactions between AI agents and humans to prevent lateral movements and other risks.

The new Singapore office, which absorbed the team from Proofpoint’s 2022 acquisition of Dathena, a Singapore-based data security startup, is also a key node in the company’s AI development efforts. “This is a key hub for our AI innovation,” said Lee. “We are proud that we are one of the few companies that has AI development capabilities in Singapore.”