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Security Software Solutions Ltd (S3 Ltd)

KnowBe4 Defend: Cloud Email Security - Inbound

KnowBe4 Defend Cloud Email Security protects against data breaches by reducing human activated risk.

Intelligent technologies detect sophisticated phishing attacks (such as BEC, impersonation attacks, email spoofing or compromised accounts) that slip through the SEG. Defend then engages users with contextual, colour-coded warnings embedded in suspicious emails.

Features

  • Protects against sophisticated phishing attacks that evade existing email security
  • Protects against ransomware; detecting attacks early in the kill chain
  • Detects anomalous behaviours using intelligent technologies e.g. socialgraph and ML
  • Engages/empowers users with colour-coded, contextual warnings embedded in emails
  • M-SOAR capabilities enable incident investigation and remediation
  • Augments existing email security/native security provided by your email platform
  • Protects from supply-chain attacks by treating all senders as untrusted
  • Link rewriting and time-of-click analysis detects post-delivery weaponised URLs
  • Linguistic and contextual analysis detects signs of social engineering
  • Productivity management improves user productivity and reduces admin burden

Benefits

  • Protects against data breaches by reducing human activated risk
  • Lowers administration overhead with intelligent self-learning threat detection
  • Reduces user-friction by engaging/warning only when risk is evident
  • Supports migration to MS365 email-security by augmenting its protection capabilities
  • Automated deployment in mailflow avoids risks inherent in API-only implementations
  • Lowers time to respond and remediate email-related incidents
  • Reduces the risks associated with sophisticated phishing and BEC attacks
  • Teachable moments positively change user behaviour
  • Low time to demonstrate value
  • Reinforces security awareness training to increase its effectiveness and ROI

Pricing

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at sales@s3-uk.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 15

Service ID

4 8 0 2 2 0 7 3 8 8 8 6 9 2 7

Contact

Security Software Solutions Ltd (S3 Ltd) Tony Mason
Telephone: 01628 362784
Email: sales@s3-uk.com

About your service

Service categories

Applications

Collaborative

  • Email
Multi cloud support
No

Service scope

Software add-on or extension
No
Cloud deployment model
Public cloud
Service constraints
None
System requirements
  • M 365 Email
  • MS Outlook 2013, 2016, 2019, … for M365
  • Supported browsers (Chrome/Safari/Firefox etc) for admin console

User support

Email or online ticketing support
Yes, at extra cost
Support response times
KnowBe4 provides email/online ticketing support Mon-Fri (9am-6pmGMT). Overseas offices have extended hours. Tickets received out-of-office hours will be worked by next available operations centre, however no action can be guaranteed until next working day. Support is prioritised by subscription level/impact.
Full details on support hours: https://www.knowbe4.com/hubfs/KnowBe4-Support-Document.pdf?t=1518625292505&hsLang=ja-jp

Please see our standard Service Level Agreement (SLA) for response times: https://www.knowbe4.com/legal/service-level-agreement.
As a SaaS provider serving a global customer base, we maintain a uniform SLA across our entire customer base. This consistency enables us to deliver reliable performance, scale efficiently, maintain our robust security protocols, and provide timely support to all customers.
User can manage status and priority of support tickets
No
Phone support
Yes
Phone support availability
9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
Web chat support
No
Onsite support
No
Support levels
KnowBe4 have a standard Service Level Agreement which is available to all customers, accessible for review at https://www.knowbe4.com/legal/service-level-agreement.

Every customer is assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) as part of their subscription, ensuring tailored support aligned with your organisation’s unique goals and desired outcomes. CSMs are subject matter experts across all KnowBe4 products and serve as your liaison to technical support and product teams.
After deployment and onboarding, should you need any assistance, there are different options for getting in touch with us. The first is calling or emailing your CSM with your questions. If the CSM cannot address the issue, they will fill out a support ticket on your behalf. Alternatively, customers can submit a support ticket from the KnowBe4 platform/website or call our Help Desk line.

If the issue cannot be handled by our initial support, you would be directed to our Enterprise Support Level III. These support reps have the most intimate familiarity with KnowBe4 products, however, issues rarely come up that need this support.
Support available to third parties
Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

Getting started
Customers purchasing Defend can benefit from:

- A dedicated Professional Services engineer who will perform the installation and initial configuration until the customer is happy with the service

- Technical documentation and user guides which can be used for training purposes.
Service documentation
Yes
Documentation formats
  • HTML
  • PDF
End-of-contract data extraction
Customers can export their data from the admin dashboard.
End-of-contract process
The customer should disable/remove any Microsoft 365 transport rules to stop emails routing to the Defend service.
Documentation accessibility standard
None or don’t know
How the documentation is accessible
Onboarding / offboarding documentation is provided to our customers by our Customer Success team.  Some information, e.g. user guides are also available online via our website.

Using the service

Web browser interface
Yes
Supported browsers
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Firefox
  • Chrome
  • Safari
  • Opera
  • Other
Application to install
No
Designed for use on mobile devices
Yes
Differences between the mobile and desktop service
Mobile friendly user interface with a condensed summary page
Service interface
Yes
User support accessibility
None or don’t know
Description of service interface
Informative banners are inserted into the email to indicate types and levels of phishing. The banners are clickable to display additional information about the threat.
Accessibility standards
None or don’t know
Description of accessibility
KnowBe4 is committed to ensuring website accessibility for people with disabilities and those experiencing situational barriers. For example, our content is designed to meet the level AA standards for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

All accessibility features are dependent on the email client and device being used to read email. Defend does not affect or impact any of the accessibility features that are already available to the user.
Accessibility testing
As described above, accessibility is provided via the email client and device being used
API
Yes
What users can and can't do using the API
The API is only available to Administrators of the service and is used for extracting metrics regarding emails processed and threats discovered. This is used to integrate into existing orchestration tools, such as siems, sores, socs etc
API documentation
Yes
API documentation formats
PDF
API sandbox or test environment
No
Customisation available
Yes
Description of customisation
Customisation can only be carried out by authorised staff through the administrator platform: Reporting range and filtering
Display of non threat banners
Turn on/off URL filtering
Handling of Dangerous URLs
Alerting options
Manage Allow list
Manage Deny list
Manage productivity allow list

Scaling

Independence of resources
KnowBe4 services are built on scalable public cloud services and are architected to provide scalable solutions that minimise the impact of any specific customer. Each product is provisioned with the resources required to deliver the service. Shared components are built with redundancy and high-availability as a key element of their design

Analytics

Service usage metrics
Yes
Metrics types
Infrastructure metrics, KnowBe4 platform operates with 99.9% uptime, to be reviewed annually 

Application metrics. your administrators through the administrator page can view statistics associated with the detection of emails classified as Dangerous and Suspicious:
Types of phishing emails Types of Payload Supply Chain Health
Reporting types
  • Real-time dashboards
  • Reports on request
Resource tagging
No
FOCUS resource tagging
No

Resellers

Supplier type
Reseller providing extra features and support
Organisation whose services are being resold
KnowBe4

Staff security

Staff security clearance
Conforms to BS7858:2019
Government security clearance
Developed Vetting (DV)

Asset protection

Knowledge of data storage and processing locations
Yes
Data storage and processing locations
  • United Kingdom
  • European Economic Area (EEA)
  • Other locations
User control over data storage and processing locations
Yes
Datacentre security standards
Managed by a third party
Penetration testing frequency
At least every 6 months
Penetration testing approach
‘IT Health Check’ performed by a CHECK service provider
Protecting data at rest
Other
Other data at rest protection approach
KnowBe4 leverages AWS for data encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest (AES-GCM 256). KnowBe4 currently uses Load Balancer and CloudFront Security Policies supporting TLS 1.2 and higher. KnowBe4 uses the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) service to enable data at rest encryption across our products. We use this for encrypting data within databases, and data stored within object storage (S3). AWS KMS uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm in Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) with 256-bit secret keys.
Data sanitisation process
Yes
Equipment disposal approach
Complying with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v4.0, CAS (Sanitisation) or ISO/IEC 27001
Data sanitisation type
  • Deleted data can’t be directly accessed / Cryptographic Erasure
  • Data Erasure

Data importing and exporting

Data export approach
Customers can export their data from the admin dashboard.
Data export formats
Other
Other data export formats
N/a
Data import formats
Other
Other data import formats
N/a to this service

Data-in-transit protection

Data protection between buyer and supplier networks
TLS (version 1.2 or above)
Data protection within supplier network
TLS (version 1.2 or above)

Availability and resilience

Guaranteed availability
KnowBe4 have a standard Service Level Agreement which is available to all customers, accessible for review at https://www.knowbe4.com/legal/service-level-agreement.
As a SaaS provider serving a global customer base, we maintain a uniform SLA across our entire customer base. This consistency enables us to deliver reliable performance, scale efficiently, maintain our robust security protocols, and provide timely support to all customers.
KnowBe4 will remediate any agreed upon deficiencies within its stated vulnerability remediation SLA posted on https://www.knowbe4.com/terms.
Approach to resilience
KnowBe4's services are built on resilient public cloud services and is architected to provide a scalable solution that allows both vertical and horizontal scaling through the provisioning of appropriate resources to support customer requirements. Components are built with redundancy and high-availability as a key element of their design in order to ensure responsiveness and availability
Outage reporting
1. a public dashboard,

For status and uptime monitoring refer to KnowBe4's status page - https://status.knowbe4.com

Identity and authentication

User authentication needed
No
Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
Access to management interfaces and support channels are restricted by both procedural and technical enforced security including infrastructure restrictions and privileged access management software
Access restriction testing frequency
At least once a year
Management access authentication
  • Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Username or password
  • Other
Description of management access authentication
Management service - OKTA - Fido key

Audit information for users

Access to user activity audit information
Users have access to real-time audit information
How long user audit data is stored for
At least 12 months
Access to supplier activity audit information
Users contact the support team to get audit information
How long supplier audit data is stored for
At least 12 months
How long system logs are stored for
At least 12 months

Security governance

Named board-level person responsible for service security
Yes
Security governance certified
Yes
Security governance standards
  • ISO/IEC 27001
  • Other
Other security governance standards
Our certifications and information regarding which standards are followed can be found here: https://www.knowbe4.com/legal/security
Information security policies and processes
KnowBe4 has a comprehensive set of security policies in place, all of which are subject to periodic external evaluation by auditors. For further details, please refer to KnowBe4's due diligence package, which includes the table of contents for the relevant policies and procedures.
Software Security Code of Practice
Yes

Operational security

Configuration and change management standard
Supplier-defined controls
Configuration and change management approach
KnowBe4’s change management process assures security checks and peer reviews are in place for all code changes made to the KSAT production environment. KnowBe4’s infrastructure is managed by code. All security changes go through SAST and dependency checks prior to being deployed. All major changes undergo a security and privacy assessment throughout the life cycle as early as the initial planning stages.
Vulnerability management type
Supplier-defined controls
Vulnerability management approach
The KnowBe4 information security team performs web application vulnerability scans monthly. These scans are configured to run as authenticated scans. KnowBe4 also conducts internal penetration testing periodically and currently participates in a private bug bounty program where vetted researchers conduct ongoing penetration testing of our applications and infrastructure.

All vulnerabilities discovered from scans or penetration testing are added to a tracker where they are verified, categorized, and evaluated for actual risk.

Vulnerabilities are remediated based on KnowBe4's remediation timeline, please refer to - https://www.knowbe4.com/security
Protective monitoring type
Supplier-defined controls
Protective monitoring approach
KnowBe4 leverages a SIEM to monitor events. The production environment leverages Amazon AWS, WAF, CloudFront, GuardDuty, Shield, VPCs, IAM, Security Groups, and other controls. Changes to the environment are logged and monitored. All changes are required to go through KnowBe4's change management process. Vulnerabilities are remediated in accordance with the schedule listed here: https://www.knowbe4.com/security
Incident management type
Supplier-defined controls
Incident management approach
Incident management is defined in the Information Security Program & further detailed in the Security Incident Response Plan which includes: roles, communication, incident categories, testing along with procedural processes for preparation, identification, containment, remediation, investigation, follow-up/ Lessons Learned, and Notifications. KnowBe4 will notify customers within 72hrs of confirmation of breach affecting customer's data by email. For any outages please reference: https://status.knowbe4.com/
Post-quantum cryptography secure
Yes

Secure development

Approach to secure software development best practice
Conforms to a recognised standard, but self-assessed

Public sector networks

Connection to public sector networks
No

Pricing

Discount for educational organisations
No
Free trial available
No

Discount percentage by annual call-off contract value (excluding VAT)

Less than £250,000
0%
Between £250,000 and £500,000
0%
Between £500,001 and £1,000,000
0%
Between £1,000,001 and £2,500,000
0%
Between £2,500,001 and £5,000,000
0%
Over £5,000,001
0%

Non-mandatory Standards and certifications

ISO/IEC 27001 certification
No
ISO 28000:2022 certification
No
ISO 9001 certification
No
Quality management systems (QMS)
No
CSA STAR certification
No
PCI certification
No
Cyber essentials
Yes
Please provide your Cyber Essentials Certificate Number
C8ca4f55-169b-4e20-8e4f-7921c88f253a
Cyber essentials plus
No
Cyber Essentials Alternative
None of the criteria
Other security certifications
No

Social value

Section B - Commitment for Future: Delivery
  • Mission: Kick start economic growth. To secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 - with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.

    Policy Outcome 1: Fair work: That offers fair wages and good working conditions. Help people get a job, stay in work, and progress in their careers, with good employment opportunities across the country. Notes: Where there is a large proportion of labour costs in the contract, commercial teams should consider MAC in Outcome 1 as a priority

    • New or retained jobs on the contract workforce in the relevant area that meet the criteria set out in MAC 1b, 1c and 1d
    • Providing opportunities for, and measuring and monitoring of, staff workforce conditions over time, including employee engagement, involvement in decision-making and satisfaction and adapting to any changes in the results, with clear processes for acting on issues identified
    • Payment of more than the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage (as appropriate) to the contract workforce
    • Understanding of in-work progression issues affecting the market, industry or sector relevant to the contract, and in the supplier’s own organisation and those of its key sub-contractors
    • Measures to support in-work progression to help people in the contract workforce, to move into higher paid work by developing new skills relevant to the contract
    • Understanding of the modern slavery risks and issues affecting the market, industry, sector or country (of origin or of source) relevant to the contract, and the workforce in the supplier’s own organisation and those of its key subcontractors
    • How to ensure business decisions re: price/cost, short lead times, payment timescales do not create modern slavery risks in the supply chain
  • Mission: Kick start economic growth. To secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 - with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.

    Policy Outcome 2: Skills for growth: Supporting growth sectors and addressing skills gaps.

    • Understanding of employment and relevant skills issues, and of the education and training issues relating to the contract. Illustrative examples: demographics, skills shortages, new opportunities in high growth sectors, geographic/local community and skills/employment challenges
    • Support for educational attainment relevant to the contract, including training schemes that address skills gaps and result in recognised qualifications
    • Activities to support relevant sector related skills growth and sustainability in the contract workforce. Illustrative examples: careers talks, curriculum support, literacy support, safety talks and volunteering
  • Mission: Kick start economic growth. To secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 - with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.

    Policy Outcome 3: Resilient, innovative and flexible supply chains: Support economic growth through enabling resilient businesses, opportunities for small businesses and voluntary, community and social enterprises

    • Understanding of the types of businesses in the market and the level of participation by new businesses, entrepreneurs, start-ups, SMEs, VCSEs and mutuals
    • Activities to identify opportunities to open up sub-contracts under the prime contract to a diverse range of businesses, including new businesses, entrepreneurs, start-ups, SMEs, VCSEs and mutuals
    • Plans for engaging a diverse range of businesses in engagement activities prior to appointing subcontractors (including activities prior to award of the main contract and during the contract term)
    • Understanding of local demographics, needs and opportunities for the co-design of the goods, services and works to be delivered under the contract
  • Mission: Make Britain a clean energy superpower: To cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030, accelerating to net zero

    Policy Outcome 4: Sustainable procurement practices: Reducing carbon footprints, minimising waste, and promoting the use of clean energy and green technologies.

    • Understanding of opportunities for additional environmental benefits delivery in the performance of the contract, including working towards net zero carbon emissions and use of clean energy and green technologies
    • Understanding of how to influence staff, suppliers, customers, communities and/or any other appropriate stakeholders through the delivery of the contract to support climate and nature protection and improvement
    • Activities to reconnect people with the environment and increase awareness of ways to protect and enhance it
  • Mission: Break down barriers to opportunity: By reforming our childcare and education systems, to make sure there is no class ceiling on the ambitions of young people in Britain

    Policy Outcome 6: Employment and training: For those who face barriers to employment

    • Understanding of employment and skills issues, and of the skills and employment shortages of high growth sectors relating to the contract
    • Understanding of the issues affecting the representation of disabled people in the workforce in the market, industry or sector relevant to the contract, and in the supplier’s own organisation and those of its key sub-contractors
    • Inclusive and accessible development practices, including guidance for line managers on recruiting, managing and developing people with a disability or health condition
  • Mission: Break down barriers to opportunity: By reforming our childcare and education systems, to make sure there is no class ceiling on the ambitions of young people in Britain

    Policy Outcome 7: Creating a pipeline of opportunities: For the contract workforce, reducing barriers to entry for under-represented groups.

    • Understanding of the issues affecting the development of new skills by target cohort
    • Understanding of issues relating to entering the contract workforce
  • Mission: Build an NHS fit for the future: That is there when people need it; with fewer lives lost to the biggest killers; in a fairer Britain, where everyone lives well for longer.

    Policy Outcome 8: Increasing productivity through physical and mental wellbeing: In the supply chain and communities in the relevant area.

    • Understanding of issues relating to health and wellbeing, including physical and mental health, in the contract workforce
    • Understanding barriers to access to health and social care services or employment opportunities e.g. digital inclusion

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at sales@s3-uk.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.