Microsoft Defender ICES vendor ecosystem partner
KnowBe4 Defend
Advanced Inbound Threat Defense for Email & Microsoft Teams
Stop the breach today while building a more intuitive, security-aware workforce for tomorrow.
The Threat Reality Your Tech Wasn't Built For
Of breaches still involve the human element
(Verizon 2026 DBIR)Of phishing attacks (Oct '25–Mar '26) were AI-driven
KnowBe4 Phishing Threat Trends Report, Vol. 7 (April 2026)Increase in phishing evading Secure Email Gateways
KnowBe4 Phishing Threat Trends Report, Vol. 7 (April 2026)Teams attacks are now multi-channel
KnowBe4 Phishing Threat Trends Report, Vol. 7 (April 2026)AI-Powered Email Security That Understands Humans
KnowBe4 Defend doesn't rely on a black box. Its behavioral AI understands linguistic patterns, urgency, and intent to map relationships and historical context.
Defend stops AI-generated phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) across email, while surfacing risky activity and security posture gaps in Microsoft Teams. Localized teachable moments keep end users vigilant and ready to intervene when it counts.
The result: advanced protection against AI-generated attacks paired with sustainable behavior change across your workforce.
Three Pillars of Product Innovation Behind Defend
Every pillar below solves a job you already have. Whether that's proving program maturity to your board, freeing your team from tool sprawl and alert fatigue, or building a workforce that gets harder to fool over time. Defend is going to allow your organization to work smarter and stay safer with the metrics to prove it.
Type any criteria in plain English, like sender, threat type, or date range, and Defend applies the right filters instantly.
Run Defend as an inline SMTP gateway or a Graph API post-delivery layer, whichever fits your architecture.
Validate detection in Report-only mode, then move to automated Block on your own timeline.
Groups related phishing and graymail waves into one investigative view instead of message-by-message triage.
Unified quarantine, detection timeline and threat-hunting data flow directly into Defender XDR and Sentinel.
One policy update closes the gap across both email and Microsoft Teams at once.
Real-time dashboards on threat trends, Teams risk and productivity savings, ready to bring to the board.
Surfaces the specific events admins need to see, so nothing risky gets buried in raw logs.
Value to Your Org
You're getting the threat intelligence you need, fast, and the visibility to easily showcase ROI to your board with cyber risk quantification.
Metrics for Your Board
- Security or IT tool switching costs
- Help-desk escalations
- Analyst experience and capacity
- Incident growth relative to company growth
- Mean Time to Acknowledge, Mean Time to Triage, and Mean Time to Investigate
Self-learning AI and natural language processing (NLP) map historical communication patterns to catch BEC and zero-day account compromise before users engage.
Purpose-built to catch AI-generated phishing, deepfake-driven impersonation and polymorphic lures that signature-based tools were never designed to see.
Semantic analysis, sender intelligence, header and authentication checks, link analysis and attachment inspection fire in parallel and escalate automatically when signals correlate.
Average time to update for zero-day detection: zero. Defend is built on proactive detection, where its AI systems detect the building blocks of a phishing attack without relying on reactive rule updates.
Trained across 70,000+ organizations and the KnowBe4 Threat Labs, giving our models a depth of signal no point tool or gateway vendor can match.
Every block or flag shows the specific why, not a black-box score your SOC has to take on faith.
A threat confirmed in one customer's environment is recognized and blocked across the entire customer base, and every validated finding retrains the model.
The same detection engine covers posture management and external-sender monitoring to close the chat-based social engineering gap.
Value to Your Org
Catch the advanced, AI-generated, and payload-free attacks that Microsoft 365 and SEGs are architecturally built to miss, without adding a black-box tool your SOC has to blindly trust.
Metrics for Your Board
- Advanced-threat catch rate beyond your M365/SEG baseline
- BEC and link-attack miss-rate reduction
- SOC hours reclaimed from automated correlation
- Percentage of material security incident response processes addressed by automated response versus human response
- Mean time to detect
Color-coded Outlook tags and banners, rewritten (not just translated) by native speakers across 13 languages.
When Graph API quarantines an item, Defend sends a personalized notification explaining exactly why and what phishing signs to watch for next time.
Every employee report feeds the detection engine directly, so reporting behavior actively strengthens protection in real time.
PhishRIP automates mass, one-click remediation across every affected mailbox, with the option to flip the attack into a simulation to see who would've fallen for it.
Value to Your Org
Behavior change compounds over time instead of resetting with every new attack variant. Your workforce gets measurably harder to phish, not just temporarily blocked, across every collaboration surface: email and Teams alike.
Metrics for Your Board
- % of users who stop after a teachable moment
- Org/department/individual Risk Score trend over time
- Reduction in repeat-click behavior
- Phish Alert Button reporting rate
- Help-desk tickets tied to flagged-email confusion
- Mean time to remediate
"Metrics for your board" are indicators your team can track over time to demonstrate program impact — not results Defend guarantees on its own.
How KnowBe4 Defend Works
Detect
Five engines fire in parallel the moment an email arrives — NLP, Sender Intelligence, Header & Auth, Link Analysis, and Attachment Analysis.
Alert
Color-coded Outlook Category Tags or interactive banners provide visual cues in the inbox, allowing users to identify threats before reading the email.
Educate
Automated teachable moment emails provide detailed overviews tailored to each user to increase workforce vigilance.
Remediate
Collapses thousands of related threats into a single investigative view for mass, one-click remediation.
What Our Customers Say
Defend’s value is proven every day in the statistics shown in its threat intelligence dashboard. The banners have also dramatically increased employees’ everyday vigilance to phishing attacks.
We were looking for a new solution that went above and beyond the SEG – and that’s exactly what Defend has given us. It has optimized every aspect of our email security, from detection and remediation to security awareness training.
KnowBe4 is Recognized as a 2025 Gartner Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for Email Security
Deploy Your Way
KnowBe4 is one of the only vendors offering a choice between SMTP and Graph API deployments, both featuring real-time, point-of-risk user education.
Defend SMTP Email Flow
Inbound Email
Phish threats enter mailflow
Microsoft 365
DEFEND
AI-Powered Phish Detection
User Inbox
Benign & Suspicious
Quarantine
Dangerous Threats
Graph API Email Flow
Inbound Email
Phish threats enter mailflow
Microsoft 365
User Inbox
User Inbox
Benign & Suspicious
DEFEND
AI-Powered Phish Detection
Quarantine
Dangerous Threats
Post-Delivery: Leverages API for analysis without altering mail flow.
Gmail Email Flow
Inbound Email
Phish threats enter mailflow
User Inbox
User Inbox
Benign & Suspicious
DEFEND
AI-Powered Phish Detection
Junk
Dangerous Threats
Post-Delivery: No Quarantine, send Dangerous to Junk.
Real Outcomes From Organizations Running Defend Today
30%+
higher threat capture rate
97%
risk reduction with point-of-risk teachable moments
95%
operational time savings
35%
noise reduction from graymail and spam
Ricky Robertson, Director of Information Security
Industry Recognition
See KnowBe4 Defend™ in Action
Learn how Defend™ strategically enhances Microsoft 365 native security to catch the threats Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) and others miss.
Related Resources
KnowBe4 named a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security Platforms
Email Security Kit:
Resources to Help You Close the Email Protection Gap
KnowBe4 Defend Datasheet
Gartner, Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Email Security Platforms, Peer Contributors, July 4, 2025.
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