eTorch has solutions that use machine learning to stop social engineering and human identity attacks, Mimecast said in a statement.

It said the acquisition boosted Mimecast’s Email Security 3.0 strategy that was designed to improve cyber security at the email perimeter, inside the organisation and beyond the perimeter.

"The powerful combination of Mimecast and MessageControl is engineered to provide customers using productivity apps, such as Microsoft 365, even stronger protection against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks," the company said.

"Additionally, it is designed to prevent the inadvertent loss of sensitive and confidential data, while also serving as an additional sensor to further enrich Mimecast’s threat intelligence."

Mimecast is a British company with 12 offices and 1700 employees. It listed on the NASDAQ on 19 November 2015. eTorch is based in Chicago and owns US patents for email privacy enforcement, client agnostic email processing and email data collection compliance enforcement.

The company said the acquisition would not have a material impact on its earnings for 2021.

The acquisition is expected to add the following capabilities to Mimecast:

• Machine-learning identification of anomalous behaviour. MessageControl’s graph technology is engineered to inspect email attributes and content and then apply machine learning to build a library of known and unknown patterns for an individual user. The technology is designed to get smarter over time and has the ability to make real time decisions on 1 billion plus unique user behaviour data points.
• Contextual, real-time warnings in email. MessageControl empowers employees to help make better choices by providing them with more intelligent, contextual, and dynamic warnings of potentially untrusted senders or content into emails.
• The ability to prevent misaddressed email data leaks. Leveraging the graph technology, MessageControl is built to notify employees before they accidentally send information to the wrong recipients by using historical sending patterns to predict future anomalies.

“The first half of 2020 has been unlike anything we’ve experienced before. It’s becoming increasingly clear that better innovation is required to protect against the latest weaponised and unweaponised attacks,” said Mimecast chief executive Peter Bauer.

“MessageControl is a natural complement to Mimecast’s suite of cyber resilience solutions – from email and Web security through brand protection, security awareness training, and data protection.

"Its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities will offer additional layers of defence by evolving and ‘learning’ the customer environment and user behaviours over time. We believe this acquisition allows Mimecast to continue to evolve our Email Security 3.0 strategy and provide the best protection for productivity cloud applications like Microsoft 365.”