EMC Grabs Silver Tail to Fight Cyber Crime

November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

The world of cyber fraud and cyber warfare is undergoing a period of rapid transformation and expansion, and with last week’s acquisition of Web fraud detection company Silver Tail Systems, EMC shows that it plans to be in the thick of the battles.

Cyber criminals are increasingly using sophisticated technology and novel approaches–such as blended attacks and polymorphic malware–to gain an edge over the good guys and crack the security of the good guys. The problem is that traditional signature-based security tools are no longer sufficient to differentiate between regular Web sessions and malicious Web sessions. This is especially true when the overall volume of network traffic bumps the problem into “big data” realm, which tempts the bad guys to attempt to hide in the traffic.

In response, the good guys are increasingly turning to tools that can analyze the behavior of Web sessions, as opposed to trying to detect certain types of files. Silver Tail Systems is one of the young companies incorporating behavior analysis into their security tools.

Silver Tail develops “Web session intelligence” software designed to protect customers by evolving security threats by analyzing massive amounts of data collected in real time from the Web. The company says its behavioral analysis engine uses heuristics and rules “to detect anomalies, IT security threats, fraud, insider threats, business logic abuse and other malicious activity.”

The Menlo Park, California, company has received accolades for its software, which it claims is providing monitoring for “upwards of 330,000 clicks per second for some of the largest ecommerce and banking providers on the market today.”

Now that it’s part of EMC, Silver Tail products will be incorporated into the storage giant’s RSA subsidiary. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, as Silver Tail was privately held.

“The industry is well beyond the point of providing effective security using static, perimeter point tools that fail to keep up with dynamic cyber attackers,” says Art Coviello, an executive chairman with RSA and an executive VP with EMC. “Customers need better intelligence, analytics, and the ability to respond in real time, which is a capability that Silver Tail’s products do extraordinarily well to help foil Web-based attacks.”