By Charles F. Moreira
Anti-online fraud company RSA’s acquisition of the California-based start up Silver Tail Systems on 30 October, 2012 gave it a new dimension in combating online fraud.
It isn’t just another anti-phishing, drive-by download blocking or Web applications firewall watching for SQL injection attacks, but a Web session intelligence and behavioural analysis engine which closely observes and analyses user mouse-click patterns and behaviour especially on e-commerce, Internet banking, payments and other sites especially where financial transactions are conducted.
“Silver Tail uses a statistical engine to continuously learn and identify in real-time what is normal for genuine users and what is unusual and suggests possible malicious intent,” Eric Lam, Business Development Manager, IPV, EMC International SARL told Enterprise IT News on the sidelines of its Financial Service Industry Roundtable in Kuala Lumpur on 14 May, 2013. RSA is the security division of EMC.
In real life
An example of Silver Tail’s effectiveness is in the area of account take over fraud in online banking. whereby stolen ebanking credentials are used to log into a user’s account, usually with the intent to steal funds through a fraudulent bank transfer.
“However, with Silver Tail monitoring every click by every user on that internet banking website, we know what is the normal behaviour and in the event of a fraudster logging in using the correct credentials, the unusual behaviour of trying to transfer money out to an unknown account will be caught immediately, in spite of the correct credentials being used to log in,” said Lam.
The massive volumes of click-stream traffic generated (resulting in big data) are monitored by a span port (mirror port) and when it sees something unusual, it will assign a risk factor to it to alert systems administrators.
RSA sees opportunity in big data, which if harnessed effectively, promises to add dimensions to behaviour analytics which was not possible in the past.
Meanwhile, Jon Oltsik, Principal Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group believes that when combined with RSA’s focus on the intersection of big data and security analytics, Silver Tail will provide extremely deep security analytics from the networking to application (OSI) layers.
While Silver Tail currently appeals to the largest of enterprises which have the skills and resources to handle it while most smaller enterprises won’t, so RSA should offer Silver Tail anti-fraud security intelligence and managed services, which potentially is lucrative and huge market with few competitors. Also, if RSA combines Silver Tail with EMC platforms such as Greenplum, it can also be a big part of business analytics and also provide tremendous value to existing Silver Tail customers.
“The financial service industry currently makes up 70% of the business of my RSA division,” said Lam. However, most Silver Tail customers are based in the U.S. so far and there are none yet in Malaysia.
