Email Security Needs Its Periodic Table Moment
Security Boulevard, Friday, June 5th, 2026
Email security should classify attacks by attacker intent rather than technique, mirroring Mendeleev's periodic-table shift.
Written by Alan LeFort, CEO of StrongestLayer, this article argues email security needs a 'periodic table moment' analogous to Mendeleev's 1869 reorganization of elements by atomic weight, which revealed gaps for undiscovered elements.
For 25 years the industry has classified email attacks by technique (phishing, business email compromise, malware, spam), but that technique layer is fracturing and any taxonomy anchored to it fractures with it.
The author urges shifting the organizing principle from 'what technique did the attacker use?' to 'what were they trying to accomplish?' He opens with a January 2026 case in which a mid-market financial firm caught an active attack at the credential-capture stage while a parallel legacy secure email gateway generated no alert, illustrating why intent-based classification matters.