Case closed: Mimecast keeps phishers out of Fichte & Co. Legal's inboxes

Challenge

In early 2017 Fichte & Co. – one of the United Arab Emirates’ leading law firms –  saw in increase in sophisticated and tailored phishing attacks against its network. While Fichte & Co. had an anti-spam/anti-virus solution in place to combat email-borne attacks, its threat protection capabilities were thin, with multiple threats entering its network each week. With the barrage leading to staff fatigue – and staff losing confidence in email as a communications tool – Managing Partner Jasamin Fichte knew she had to act quickly.

Solution

Fichte consulted with CIO Matthew James Peet, who recommended that the firm implement a new email security management solution focused primarily on targeted threat protection. Based on past experience with several vendors and after detailed analysis, Peet concluded that Mimecast was the best fit for Fichte & Co., for its technological capabilities as well as its flexibility and support.

Within 48 hours of Fichte & Co. signing on with Mimecast, an engineer was onsite in Dubai implementing Mimecast’s Secure Email Gateway with Targeted Threat Prevention solution. Within a few hours the solution was up and running, protecting the firm from email-borne threats such as spear-phishing, ransomware, impersonation emails and more.

With Mimecast in place, CIO Peet reports that the number of threats making it through to Fichte & Co. email users has been reduced by 94 percent. Mimecast now blocks 60 percent of inbound email at the gateway. In one recent month, Mimecast stopped users from accessing multiple malicious URLs and from receiving multiple emails with malicious attachments that required sandboxing to catch. Mimecast’s engineer tuned the system’s settings so that the false positive rate is essentially zero, ensuring no valid emails are lost, for UAE court compliance.

Peet says he has been impressed by Mimecast’s ability to strike the right balance between security and compliance and to keep up with new types of threats as they appear in the wild.

Summary

In a year when Peet’s team undertook several large IT projects – including a Windows 10 migration – he notes that Mimecast is the project staff members stop him in the hall to thank him for. “Our staff have seen a huge decrease not just in phishing emails, but also spam,” Peet says. “They can now easily find things in their email and are much more productive than they were before. Mimecast has had a huge impact on our daily work.”

“On the evening of the WannaCry attacks, our managing partner was on the phone with me asking, ‘Are we protected?’ Thanks in part to Mimecast, I could confidently tell her, ‘Yes,’ and then sleep well. Not too many CIOs slept well that night.”

Matthew James Peet - CIO, Fichte & Co.