Automated data security company Varonis Systems plans to acquire phishing protection company SlashNext Inc. for a reported $150 million. SlashNext’s technology offers what it calls SEER, for Session Emulation and Environment Reconnaissance. It uses cloud-hosted virtual browser environments to crawl and interact with suspicious web page URLs and pages at run time. The platform can observe multistage phishing flows, hidden redirects, credential-harvesting forms and other deceptive behaviors that static scanning often misses by executing pages inside safe, instrumented environments. The company also delivers protection via multiple enforcement and telemetry points, including real-time blocklists and Domain Name System Response Policy Zone, application programming interface and gateway integrations and threat intelligence feeds that feed Security Orchestration, Automation and Response and threat intelligence platforms. The multichannel delivery allows organizations to automatically stop newly created phishing sites and feed contextual evidence, such as screenshots, indicators and verdicts, into incident response workflows so triage can be faster and more accurate. SlashNext also emphasizes zero-hour detection and the ability to spot sophisticated social engineering, including targeted business email compromise, QR-code and multistep scams, by analyzing visual layout, message tone and behavioral indicators rather than relying solely on fuzzy string matches. With the acquisition Veronis plans to extend its data-centric threat detection capabilities with SlashNexts’ phishing and social engineering detection solutions.