Automated data security company Varonis Systems Inc. announced today that it plans to acquire phishing protection company SlashNext Inc. for a reported $150 million.

Founded in 2014, SlashNext is a cybersecurity company that is focused on detecting and blocking phishing and social-engineering attacks across email, browsers, mobile devices and collaboration platforms. The company positions itself as a specialist in session-level and browser-based threat inspection rather than only traditional gateway or signature approaches.

SlashNext’s technology offers what it calls SEER, for Session Emulation and Environment Reconnaissance. It uses cloud-hosted virtual browser environments to crawl and interact with suspicious web page URLs and pages at run time. The platform can observe multistage phishing flows, hidden redirects, credential-harvesting forms and other deceptive behaviors that static scanning often misses by executing pages inside safe, instrumented environments.

The company also delivers protection via multiple enforcement and telemetry points, including real-time blocklists and Domain Name System Response Policy Zone, application programming interface and gateway integrations and threat intelligence feeds that feed Security Orchestration, Automation and Response and threat intelligence platforms. The multichannel delivery allows organizations to automatically stop newly created phishing sites and feed contextual evidence, such as screenshots, indicators and verdicts, into incident response workflows so triage can be faster and more accurate.

SlashNext also emphasizes zero-hour detection and the ability to spot sophisticated social engineering, including targeted business email compromise, QR-code and multistep scams, by analyzing visual layout, message tone and behavioral indicators rather than relying solely on fuzzy string matches.

According to an independent test of cloud email security vendors conducted by The Tolly Group LLC, SlashNext outperformed leading providers such as Abnormal AI Inc. and Mimecast Inc. In the test, SlashNext demonstrated the highest overall detection accuracy, at 99%, and a perfect 100% detection rate for BEC and QR code attacks.

With the acquisition Veronis plans to extend its data-centric threat detection capabilities with SlashNexts’ phishing and social engineering detection solutions. “We can now stop one of the most prevalent forms of attack and extend our end-to-end approach to protecting data,” co-founder and Chief Executive Yaki Faitelson said in a blog post.

Coming into its acquisition, SlashNext has raised $36 million over two rounds, according to data from Tracxn. Investors included Norwest Venture Partners LP, Wing Venture Capital, Telia Co. AB and Alter Venture Partners.

Image: Varonis