Sandboxing reinvented
for automated phishing triage & enrichment

Triage and enrich alerts from your email security stack.
Analyze user-reported emails—automatically, deeply, and reliably.
Finally, a sandbox built for phishing.

Expel
Expel
The most important capability in our investigative toolkit is VMRay.
Whether it’s investigating a suspicious link that redirects to a credential harvester or a suspicious Microsoft Word document that may contain malicious macros – VMRay allows us to detonate these samples safely and generate a detailed report.
Chris King
Northwestern Mutual
We’ve gone from over 24 hours to just minutes for detection, with most investigations completed in under an hour.
Threat Analyst
Gartner Peer Insights
With other hosted sandbox solutions we observed long queue times to start analysis and frequently they tricked by the samples we were using. This solution allows us the flexibility to correctly analyze the samples we receive.

Still the #1 breach vector.
Still not solved.

Millions are spent in prevention.
Yet still, 94% of breaches are due to phishing attacks.

Phishing threats get stronger. Faster.

AI-powered phishing is here: 

faster campaigns, lower effort for attackers.

Phishing as a Service 

makes new campaigns faster to build, harder to detect.

Unknown, zero-day 

phishing threats emerge faster than legacy tools can keep up.

Phishing gets in.
Alerts pile up.

Speed over depth: 

built-in sandboxes aren’t built to go all the way down the rabbit hole

Evasive techniques, 

URL redirects behind documents or QR codes, and multi-step delivery chains fly under the radar

Thousands of alerts are blocked.

So are your business processes.

The user did their part.
Can you?

It already passed through the first layer of defense.

You need better for the 2nd line.

Signature, AV, reputation or “good enough” sandbox

won’t help anymore.

You have a backlog of reports, and

impatient users who can’t wait to “click”. 

“The most important capability in our investigative toolkit is VMRay. 

 

Whether it’s investigating a suspicious link that redirects to a credential harvester or a suspicious Microsoft Word document – VMRay allows us to detonate samples safely and generate a detailed report of the activity.”

Ray Pugh

Director, Security Operations

Expel

Don’t let users wait 
-or click.

VMRay’s abuse mailbox for

user reported phishing 

User-reported phishing emails create pressure on SOC teams.

VMRay automates their analysis, delivering fast and reliable verdicts—before users click or business gets disrupted.

Automated & fast analysis of reported emails

Clear verdicts for confident decision-making

Automated & fast analysis of reported emails

Ensure cyber resilience

even against unknown, zero-day phishing threats

Improve SOC Efficiency

Let your SOC breathe.
Let your business flow.

Enrich your CTI

Turn phishing alerts to actionable intelligence.

Privacy made in Germany

Full control over your data.
No third-party sharing.

The benefits of User-reported Phishing with VMRay

VMRay’s safe detonation and Machine Learning (ML) driven phishing analysis provides a definitive verdict with greater visibility into an email’s malicious actions.

Industry-leading detection of advanced cyber threats

Best-in-class reputational, static, and dynamic analysis of phishing and credential harvesting related email attacks.

Safe detonation and deep analysis

VMRay’s deep content inspection, recursive link analysis, file attachment verdicts, Smart Link, and other detected web objects can quickly identify emails with malicious intent.

Shine a light on phishing blind spots

Automated responses to end-user submissions reduces phishing related calls to the SOC and speeds the triage process without utilizing critical SOC team resources.

Start automating triage & accelerating response for phishing

Further resources on phishing detection

Navigating email security challenges

User-reported Phishing: How it works

Automating phishing triage

Demystifying Abuse Mailbox: FAQs

1. How is VMRay’s User Reported Phishing feature different from other vendor solutions?

User Reported Phishing helps organizations identify malicious emails that have bypassed their perimeter email security or point phishing solution. Through a combination of end-user education and technology, malicious emails can be identified and forwarded by the end-user to an Abuse Mailbox.

 

The difference between VMRay’s User Reported Phishing and other vendor solutions stops there. Other vendor solutions require a SOC Analyst to then manually triage the email to identify if it is malicious or not. The results of the process may take hours or days depending on the volume of emails received by the Abuse Mailbox.

 

VMRay differentiates against other solutions by automatically triaging and analyzing the email threat to determine if it is malicious or benign. If malicious, the SOC team is notified along with the analysis and extracted IOCs to mitigate the threat within minutes and the end-user informed. All without using SOC Team resources.

Integrating with an EDR/XDR/SOAR solution is the easiest way to implement Abuse Mailbox automation. Email threats that have bypassed perimeter email security and phishing solutions can be identified by end users educated in spotting email threats.

 

Once forwarded to the Abuse Mailbox and analyzed by VMRay, the EDR/XDR/SOAR integrated with VMRay can take automated response actions based on predefined playbooks or workflows if the reported email is a legitimate threat.

 

The IOCs extracted from the analysis can be used to create email policies, firewall rules, and detection signatures to mitigate current and any subsequent attacks.

The VMRay platform is hardened against direct attacks and constantly assessed for vulnerabilities and exposures that would allow a bad threat actor to penetrate the system. The VMRay Platform allows customers to create a completely isolated environment for analyzing advanced phishing threats, without the risks posed by open-source tools and services. With On-Premises deployments, customers can ensure their data never leaves the network.

 

VMRay offers two data center locations, one in the EU and the other in the US, to our customers. While located in different regions, both are ISO27001 compliant, meet GDPR and California Data Privacy Act standards for data protection and privacy, and meet the Singapore Monetary Authority guidelines for cloud services for the financial sector. Our customer data is protected in accordance with some of the strictest data privacy laws in the world.

Abuse Mailbox is compatible with any email system. Reported emails are forwarded to an Abuse Mailbox on the VMRay platform and automatically analyzed upon receipt. The results of the email attack analysis are then sent to the SOC team in addition to a notification of malicious or benign sent to the end user, typically within minutes.

Phishing attacks are responsible for 91-94% of successful breaches according to many industry leaders. Malware authors have developed many different methods to bypass static detection controls or methods that exceed the capabilities of vendor phishing solutions. For example, recursive embedded links in documents that go many levels deeper than the default settings of the detection control is a common tactic. Using QR-Codes that when scanned, lead to malicious websites with malware booby-trapped webpages.

 

VMRay’s Labs team work hard to keep up with the constantly changing threat landscape and the attack chain methods used by bad threat actors. Once a new Advanced phishing attack method is identified, VMRay updates YARA rules and Machine Learning engines to accurately identify these threats.

Tech Insights Deep Dive of April:
Detection Strategies & Operational Excellence

join VMRay for two powerhouse webinars designed to sharpen your threat detection and response capabilities — featuring a special joint session with Red Canary:

Live session's over. Watch the on-demand video to learn how VMRay and Red Canary combine forces to deliver faster, smarter threat detection!

Learn how to cut phishing triage time with automated detonation and deep analysis — quickly uncover threats while improving response accuracy!