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Towpath Credit Union is a community-based credit union serving northeast Ohio, with a clear vision and commitment of People Helping People both in their community and in their workplace. Towpath is dedicated to serving its 25,000 members in their financial needs from everyday banking, like checking accounts, to the purchase or refinancing of their homes. Towpath prides themselves on bringing the best member service forward with a strong, dynamic team built on values of inclusion, accountability, friendliness, equity, and reliable service.

It is this commitment to their members and community that drives Towpath to constantly improve their cybersecurity capabilities. Fighting back the tide of business email compromise and other fraud attempts is a high priority for their small, but dedicated Information Technology team. Despite deploying a secure email gateway and implementing security awareness training, Towpath’s employees and Director of IT continued to be frustrated by the volume of threats getting through. While the security awareness training improved the cyber resilience of Towpath’s employees, the same employees expected IT to solve the phishing problem. What’s more, their secure email gateway, and a specialized anti-phishing option for it, became less effective after Towpath migrated their email to Office 365. Phishing, business email compromise, and other fraud attempts continued to evade detection.

Towpath replaced the secure email gateway with Microsoft Defender for Office 365 as part of their “cloud first” initiative. They recognized the need for a complementary anti-phishing solution with the intelligence and adaptability to address the unique and targeted threats they were dealing with. Towpath also recognized the importance of engaging users to help them identify and avoid suspicious messages – in other words, apply in practice the concepts taught during the regular security awareness training.

After migrating to and properly configuring Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Towpath still needed detection and incident response for evasive phishing and fraud. On the recommendation of their trusted IT services partner, Towpath evaluated Cyren Inbox Security. They were immediately struck by the effectiveness of the solution.

“Cyren provides a unique layer of protection to our employees’ inboxes,” said Ed Schmuhl, Director of Information Technology at Towpath Credit Union. “Adding this artificial intelligence tool to our cybersecurity arsenal has already proven its value by catching emails that have made it past our other layers of defense which had the potential to cause harm to our business.” Schmuhl also realized significant time savings associated with the automated remediation and user engagement capabilities of Cyren Inbox Security, adding, “it eliminated the time we used to spend tracking down malicious messages and trying to train our employees to be experts in phishing detection.”

“Cyren Inbox Security perfectly aligns with Towpath’s digital transformation and its goal of protecting employees and members from fraud and other risks associated with phishing,” said Lior Kohavi, Chief Strategy Officer & EVP Advanced Solutions at Cyren. “Our shared success with Towpath further proves the simplicity of Cyren Inbox Security and the immediate value it provides in the form of reduced risk, increased productivity, and user engagement.”

As businesses continue to migrate to the cloud, it changes the nature of phishing threats and how to detect and respond to them. Cyren Inbox Security easily integrates with Office 365 to complement the native security capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Office 365. The result is less reliance on users to provide the last line of defense against phishing without impacting or delaying email delivery and the business services, like home mortgages, that rely on efficient and safe email communication.