{
 "id": "AIR-2020-0025",
 "slug": "proofpoint-email-protection-evasion-via-surrogate-model",
 "title": "ProofPoint Email Protection Evasion via Surrogate Model",
 "summary": "Researchers built a surrogate machine learning model to study and bypass Proofpoint's email protection system. The insights allowed them to craft malicious emails that evaded spam detection.",
 "type": "attack_on_ai",
 "categories": [
  "adversarial_evasion"
 ],
 "severity": 1,
 "targets": [
  "enterprise_deployment"
 ],
 "products": [
  "ProofPoint Email Protection"
 ],
 "incident_date": "2019-09-09",
 "incident_date_precision": "day",
 "first_reported": "2020-10-23",
 "sources": [
  {
   "url": "https://atlas.mitre.org/studies/AML.CS0008",
   "publisher": "MITRE ATLAS",
   "title": "ProofPoint Evasion",
   "published_at": "2020-10-23"
  },
  {
   "url": "https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-20634",
   "publisher": "NVD",
   "title": "National Vulnerability Database entry for CVE-2019-20634",
   "published_at": "2020-10-23"
  },
  {
   "url": "https://github.com/moohax/Talks/blob/master/slides/DerbyCon19.pdf",
   "publisher": "GitHub",
   "title": "2019 DerbyCon presentation \"42: The answer to life, the universe, and everything offensive security\"",
   "published_at": "2020-10-23"
  },
  {
   "url": "https://github.com/moohax/Proof-Pudding",
   "publisher": "GitHub",
   "title": "Proof Pudding (CVE-2019-20634) Implementation on GitHub",
   "published_at": "2020-10-23"
  },
  {
   "url": "https://youtube.com/watch?ab-channel=AdrianCrenshaw&v=CsvkYoxtexQ",
   "publisher": "youtube.com",
   "title": "2019 DerbyCon video presentation \"42: The answer to life, the universe, and everything offensive security\"",
   "published_at": "2020-10-23"
  },
  {
   "url": "https://github.com/avidml/avid-db/blob/main/vulnerabilities/2023/AVID-2023-V009.json",
   "publisher": "AVID",
   "title": "AVID-2023-V009: Proof Pudding (CVE-2019-20634) is a code repository that describes how ML researchers evaded ProofPoint's email protection system by first building a copy-cat email protection ML model, and using the insights to bypass the live system.",
   "published_at": "2023-03-31"
  }
 ],
 "source_count": 6,
 "confidence": 0.95,
 "status": "published",
 "origin": "seed_atlas",
 "tags": [
  "evasion",
  "adversarial-ml",
  "email-security",
  "CVE-2019-20634"
 ],
 "created_at": "2026-10-18T06:55:08.239Z",
 "updated_at": "2026-10-18T18:20:34.882Z"
}