GCD AI RADAR
incidents/AIR-2020-0025

ProofPoint Email Protection Evasion via Surrogate Model

Attack on AI1 Research / proof of conceptAdversarial evasion

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.

Details

type
Attack on AI
An AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
categories
  • Adversarial evasion
    Inputs crafted to make a model misclassify or miss detections (perturbations, evasion of AI-based defences).
owasp llm top 10
no entry for these categories
mitre atlas
Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
severity
1 · Research / proof of concept
Demonstrated by researchers; no known real-world exploitation.
targets
Enterprise deployment
products
ProofPoint Email Protection
incident date
9 Sep 2019
first reported
23 Oct 2020
origin
MITRE ATLAS
Derived from MITRE ATLAS (Apache 2.0, © MITRE).
classifier confidence
0.95 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
tags
evasion · adversarial-ml · email-security · CVE-2019-20634
record
created 2026-10-18 06:55Z · updated 2026-10-18 18:20Z · json

Sources · 6

  1. 2020-10-23
    ProofPoint Evasion
    MITRE ATLAS · atlas.mitre.org/studies/AML.CS0008
  2. 2020-10-23
    National Vulnerability Database entry for CVE-2019-20634
    NVD · nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-20634
  3. 2020-10-23
    2019 DerbyCon presentation "42: The answer to life, the universe, and everything offensive security"
    GitHub · github.com/moohax/Talks/blob/master/slides/DerbyCon19.pdf
  4. 2020-10-23
    Proof Pudding (CVE-2019-20634) Implementation on GitHub
    GitHub · github.com/moohax/Proof-Pudding
  5. 2020-10-23
    2019 DerbyCon video presentation "42: The answer to life, the universe, and everything offensive security"
    youtube.com · youtube.com/watch?ab-channel=AdrianCrenshaw&v=CsvkYoxtexQ
  6. 2023-03-31
    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.
    AVID · github.com/avidml/avid-db/blob/main/vulnerabilities/2023/AVID-2023-V009.json

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