Intellitactics, Covelight Systems Team up to Protect Web-Enabled Data

Black Hat Briefing, Las Vegas, NV - Intellitactics and Covelight Systems have joined forces to provide Fortune 2000 enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions with the ability to identify attempts made by authenticated users to access sensitive data residing in web-enabled applications that would normally go undetected by existing security solutions. The alliance combines the Intellitactics Security Manager software and the Covelight Percept Privacy Protection and Fraud Management technology to provide operations with the ability to monitor the activity of authenticated users accessing corporate web applications and then, upon notification of security breaches or suspicious activities, to initiate comprehensive investigatory and remediation efforts.

This powerful integration offers an alternative for information-sensitive organizations that recognize the need to converge network perimeter security with identity and access management. With a holistic approach to security management, operations can detect theft, fraud, and abuse of web-enabled assets such as financials and customer information; cut hours of investigative time; increase the accuracy of threat detection; and take preemptive action to protect critical information assets from both the "trusted" insider and the external cyber criminal.

Covelight Percept passively monitors the activity of users authorized to use corporate web applications to protect confidential identity data from theft. Without jeopardizing application availability or degrading performance, the system compares the key characteristics of login and usage activity with individual and collective norms as well as security control policies to detect abnormal and suspicious activity as it occurs and immediately initiates a security alert while providing continuous user auditing for compliance, and forensic data for incident investigation.

Intellitactics Security Manager consolidates and analyzes data from corporate security devices, operating systems, and applications, as well as environmental data such as vulnerability information, to provide real-time threat detection and historical analysis for compliance reporting, trend analysis, or forensics. The system reduces a large number of events to a reasonable number of higher quality alerts, elevates high-impact alerts as incidents, and provides security and network operations with the information necessary to proactively mitigate attacks.

From an operational perspective, the integrated product offering accelerates the threat-management timeline. The offering empowers operations to passively monitor authenticated-user activity in real-time, receive security alerts in real-time, quickly investigate suspicious activity, and take immediate action to defend against and mitigate attacks. By compressing the "time to notification, time to investigation, and time to remediation timeline," organizations can protect critical information assets, avoid expensive and embarrassing security incidents, and limit risk without sacrificing business effectiveness.

The integrated product offering from Intellitactics and Covelight allows organizations that maintain sensitive personal information to meet increasing privacy and auditing requirements imposed by compliance regulations such as Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA, and California SB 1386 as well as new privacy laws being proposed in 20 states and in both houses of the U.S. Congress. These regulations require an enterprise to:

• Establish adequate policies and controls to ensure personal data does not get into the wrong hands as a result of a security breach
• Detect when a breach has occurred
• Promptly notify all individuals who might be adversely affected by a breach.

"As is evident from the recent series of news events, an information privacy breach against an enterprise can be devastating to the corporation's brand, image, shareholder value as well as the individuals who are directly affected. Annual losses from security failures cost billions of dollars every year. Companies are under a lot of pressure to limit risk without sacrificing business effectiveness. This means they have to keep the bad guys out while they prevent losses coming from trusted insiders with unauthorized access to confidential information," explains Randall K. Davis, president and CEO of Intellitactics. "Today, our customers rely on Security Manager for operational and informational control of complex security infrastructures. By integrating Covelight Precept with Security Manager, we provide our mutual customers with a single database of audit log information that contains both Identity and Access Management information and Security infrastructure information."

"Today's business conflict is quick and easy data access versus security and privacy," explains Spencer Snedecor, CEO for Covelight. "The relative simplicity and economic benefits of web-enabled applications has introduced a new set of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by authenticated user access to confidential information and identity data. Criminals who use stolen IDs and passwords or setup fraudulent accounts to access sensitive data, and customers, employees, contractors, partners and other trusted insiders who succumb to temptation are proving to be more dangerous to enterprise security. According to Gartner, 70% of all security incidents come from insiders, and Ernst & Young reports that an insider attack against a large company causes an average of $2.7-million in damages, where the average outside attack costs $57,000."

"Corporate financials, customer data, and other trade secrets centralized in data centers are now accessible to a large number of users via web-based applications. Unfortunately, with convenience of access comes abuse and misuse," explains Scott Crawford, senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. "To make matters worse, the application environment is in a constant state of change, users are transient, access rights are rarely revoked, and user credentials are subject to phishing and identity theft. What's at risk is the integrity and security of financial data, the privacy of entrusted customer and employee information, the confidentiality of sensitive business information, as well as the company's reputation, brand, and shareholder value. The techniques of attackers and thieves are always evolving and nothing short of full-time vigilance will do. The teaming of Intellitactics Security Manager with Covelight Precept provides an organization with a comprehensive spectrum of monitoring and threat detection that fills an increasingly problematic gap for the enterprise and its business-critical applications."