Microsoft ranked second in “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Email Security, Q2 2023,” followed by Check Point in third and Cloudflare in fourth. Trend Micro, Broadcom, Barracuda and Cisco, who ranked among the top six in May 2021, have fallen from the leaders category, according to Forrester.

Jess Burn, senior analyst at Forrester, told BankInfoSecurity that Cloudflare, Check Point, Fortra, and Cisco have moved into email defense by buying cloud-native, API-enabled email security (CAPES) startups, while Crowdstrike has partnered with Abnormal Security. “There’s so much trouble that can start with a successful phish,” Burn is quoted as saying.

The rise of CAPES has challenged the legacy secure email gateway (SEG) vendors, whose responses have ranged from going private to making their own acquisitions, as Burn notes in a blog post. Another route has been to develop their own options for deploying APIs, or applied programming interfaces.

Information security decision-makers are frequently choosing to work with multiple enterprise email security vendors, according to Burn. For some, having more than one layer of defense brings peace of mind, while different vendors may also offer different capabilities. The ranking comes as threat actors are cultivating new types of email-based attacks. As TechSpot reports, security researchers have identified fraudulent emails that circumvent traditional spam filters by using QR codes or image attachments instead of containing text.

Meanwhile, email and network security company Barracuda has urged customers to immediately replace Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances affected by a freshly patched zero-day vulnerability, as Bleeping Computer reports.

As SiliconAngle reports, application security vendor ImmuniWeb has introduced free email security testing. “While our primary duty is to take care of all our customers and partners, we take our social responsibility seriously and we are strongly committed to supporting the most vulnerable organizations in their efforts to protect themselves against skyrocketing cyber attacks," ImmuniWeb CEO Ilia Kolochenko said in a statement.