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| Lee Seok-ho, right, country manager of Proofpoint Korea, and Evan Dumas, vice president, South East Asia & Korea at Proofpoint, attend a press conference at the Lotte Hotel Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of Proofpoint Korea |
By Baek Byung-yeul
Proofpoint, a Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity solution company, aims to become the top email security service provider in the Korean market within three years, the head of the company's branch office here said Wednesday.
"We've set a goal to become No. 1 in Korea's email security business within three years," Lee Suk-ho, country manager of Proofpoint Korea, said during a press conference at a hotel in Seoul on Wednesday.
"We will provide customers with visibility to ensure proper security. Through our service, our clients will be able to check which employees are under attack a lot, which employees are vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks and who accesses the sensitive information of an organization," Lee said, adding he also aims to be part of the largest size organization among overseas cybersecurity firms doing business here.
Proofpoint is a global leading cybersecurity company especially in the email security sector. The company established its Korean branch in April of this year.
These days, cybersecurity problems are being found increasingly in email and the country manager said the company offers best-in-class services in terms of preventing email-based cyber threats.
"The cybersecurity industry calls email-based cyberattacks 'business email compromise' or simply BEC. Hackers take advantage of human trust to steal money or data via email," the country manager said.
"There was a famous BEC case that happened at a Korean company few years ago. A procurement manager of a Korean company received an email from its Middle East counterpart who had sold raw materials. The counterpart requested the manager to pay $20 million to a new account. Since the two sides had established trust, the manager sent the money without any doubt. This was a typical example of a BEC scam," Lee added.
Evan Dumas, vice president, South East Asia & Korea at Proofpoint, said 88 percent of companies listed on the KOSPI 200 benchmark index are not actively blocking email-based scams, emphasizing that they need to adopt a domain-based message authentication reporting and conformance (DMARC) system.
DMARC is an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol standard. The system is widely used in companies in Europe and North America, but the adoption rate of this technology is very low in companies in the Asia Pacific region, according to Proofpoint.
"DMARC is described as a technical standard that helps protect email senders and recipients from spam. Organizations who use DMARC can actually deploy and three levels for or unqualified emails that are attempting to spoof their domains," Dumas said.
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