Bespoke Kill Chains and the End of Signature-Based Email Security
Attackers are no longer sending mass phishing runs — they are using AI to build one-off, bespoke kill chains that are architecturally designed to slip past every gateway you own. Alan LeFort, CEO and Co-Founder of StrongestLayer, joins Alan Shimel on Techstrong TV to unpack what his team found when they dissected 5,000 malicious emails that had already bypassed incumbent defenses: 36 distinct evasion techniques across five categories, and 1,400 permutations of them. Alan walks Alan through the “COVID model” that has quietly defined 25 years of cybersecurity — infect a victim, capture the signature, share it downstream — and why that model collapses the moment every attack is as unique as DNA. He explains the StrongestLayer approach: a synthetic analyst backed by forensic collector agents that reasons about each email in real time instead of pattern-matching against yesterday’s IOCs, plus real-world examples of DocuSign impersonation via SendGrid and CAPTCHA-shielded proxy pages.
