Mimecast announced the acquisition of Aware, a leading AI collaboration security platform, in a bold step toward its intent to revolutionize how organizations manage and mitigate human-centered security risks. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"In the modern digital workplace, businesses' most critical data and communications live online. While email and collaboration platforms like Slack® and Microsoft Teams are key to keeping people connected and productive, they also pose significant risks to organizations," said Marc van Zadelhoff, Mimecast's CEO. "The human attack surface has expanded significantly, and legacy tools weren't built to understand the complexity of messages, @mentions, emojis, and GIFs. It creates more vulnerability in organizations' ecosystems, leading to security gaps, blind spots, and missing context, and exposing businesses to the risk of regulatory fines, reputational damage, and loss of valuable intellectual property. Aware was developed to understand, detect, and mitigate human behavior risks in the platforms where people work and collaborate. This forward-thinking approach and AI-powered capabilities will help enable us to further expand our offerings and address the intensifying risk."

"The role of humans in cybersecurity, including the risks they pose and are exposed to, is serious but underdiscussed and misunderstood. Efforts to manage these risks were ineffective, even with the advent of security awareness and training (SA&T). In the past few years, human risk management has emerged, recognizing that breaches involve a vast array of risks and related behaviors including human error, privilege misuse, and social engineering," according to Forrester's Human Risk Management Solutions Landscape report (March 2024).

Aware's purpose-built platform and targeted AI models identify the risks found within the unstructured data of workplace collaboration tools and are designed to prevent the loss of sensitive data, improve compliance, and mitigate human risk factors. The company's advanced AI-powered capabilities strengthen Mimecast's existing investments in AI models, providing state-of-the-art security and compliance for customers' digital landscapes including impersonation detection across collaboration channels such as Zoom, expansion of Business Email Compromise (BEC) capabilities by incorporating multiple large language models, and enhancement of archiving capabilities to support multiple collaboration channels. 

Aware is designed to seamlessly integrate with the collaboration tools that organizations rely on, and the key business information and insights it gathers offer unprecedented visibility into workplace collaboration. These capabilities broaden and deepen Mimecast's HRM platform capabilities, especially as workplace collaboration booms and security risks multiply. 

"Businesses are facing new, dangerous security threats that reach beyond email to everywhere employees collaborate to get work done. Adding to the expanded attack surface, humans have become the new endpoints and the greatest risk to any business, making critical Aware's ability to leverage AI to understand context and behavior in conversations, and surface real-time insider threats at scale." said Jeff Schumann, Chief

Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Aware. "AI is not a standalone solution that can solve all cybersecurity problems. We believe the true power of AI technology lies in the ability to leverage it to understand the nuanced human element of threats. We're thrilled to join Mimecast and help customers identify potential issues and opportunities within collaboration, and better protect the collaborative worksurface."