Material Security addresses a sometimes overlooked aspect of cybersecurity: the information that remains accessible in a mailbox after it has been received. Contracts, financial documents, internal exchanges, and password reset links are all resources that can be exploited when an account is compromised. The US company develops a platform designed to protect Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 environments, supplementing message filtering with controls over accounts, data, and configurations.
A company born out of the limitations of email security
Founded in 2017 by Ryan Noon and Abhishek Agrawal, among others, Material Security starts from an observation: preventing all malicious messages from reaching their recipients is not enough to secure email. Attackers can also use stolen credentials or hijack a session to access years of correspondence and move on to other services.
The company has therefore built its offering around a defense-in-depth approach. Rather than viewing the inbox as a mere entry point, it treats it as a repository of sensitive data and a link in digital identity. This focus explains the emphasis placed on limiting the consequences of an intrusion, beyond prevention alone.
Detecting attacks and reducing opportunities for exploitation
The platform connects to cloud email services through their application programming interfaces. This integration makes it possible to analyze messages and the signals available in the environment, then apply protective measures without making the entire defense dependent on a gateway positioned ahead of message delivery. Security teams can, in particular, search for malicious campaigns and remove the relevant messages from users’ mailboxes.
Material Security also detects suspicious behavior associated with account compromise. The goal is to correlate multiple indicators to help teams investigate and respond. Monitoring security settings complements this approach by identifying configurations that increase the organization’s exposure.
Another distinctive component is the protection of sensitive information already contained in emails. Access restriction mechanisms and additional identity verification aim to make this content less readily exploitable by an intruder. The challenge is to keep it available to authorized employees while reducing the value of a stolen account.
What’s next?
Material Security operates in a market where native Microsoft and Google protections coexist with numerous specialist providers. Its ability to demonstrate the value of additional controls, without making everyday use more cumbersome or multiplying alerts, will be decisive. The expansion of attacks across all collaboration tools also reinforces the importance of a cross-cutting view of identities and data. For the company, the way forward is therefore as much about improving detection as it is about tangibly limiting what an attacker can obtain after an intrusion.