Email Received –
Suspect Everyone. No Exceptions.

A financial controller received an email from a legitimate, long-standing supplier. It contained a PDF invoice, a standard attachment. It appeared normal and opened as expected.

Are you protected? How do conventional cyber defenses intervene? How does Yazam CDR technology intervene?

Use Case

The Attack Scenario

Unbeknownst to them, the supplier's system had been breached, and this invoice PDF had been subtly altered with at least one of the many known PDF vulnerabilities that can be embedded inside legitimate PDF objects:

Scripts  ·  Attachments  ·  Links  ·  Images  ·  External programs  ·  Flash  ·  Media clips

In this use case, a Zero-Day Exploit was embedded deep within the file's structure. This seemingly innocuous PDF could be used in a kind of modern cyberattack, providing attackers with a backdoor into the financial network potentially leading to widespread ransomware or data exfiltration days or weeks later.

How Do Conventional Cyber Defenses Intervene?

Mostly, attacks such as this pass freely through the conventional cyber defenses:

Firewalls  ·  Antivirus  ·  Antimalware  ·  Secure Email Gateways / Mail Relays  ·  Web proxies  ·  Secure browsers  ·  EDR / XDR  ·  WAF  ·  Sandboxes

These tools are essential but they are largely signature-based or behavioral. A Zero-Day Exploit, by definition, has no known signature. A structurally embedded malicious object that doesn't execute at scan time defeats sandboxing. Conventional defenses were never designed to disarm file content at the structural level.

How Does Yazam CDR Technology Intervene?

Before reaching the controller's inbox, the Yazam Email CDR filter deconstructed and filtered those "invoice" PDF objects.

The Yazam CDR Engine:

• Identified non-conforming, potentially malicious elements deeply embedded within the PDF structure
• Checked whether each element was malicious
• Removed them completely if needed
• Reconstructed a clean, functional invoice as a PDF file

When using Yazam CDR technology, the controller received the legitimate invoice and was informed about the sophisticated attack that had just been neutralized.

"The file was clean. The invoice was delivered. The attack never happened."

Yazam CDR doesn't rely on knowing what the threat looks like. It rebuilds every file from a trusted structural blueprint removing anything that doesn't belong, whether it's known or brand new.