First Citizens Bank Counters Insider Threats May 23, 2005
The Percept firewall system helps the bank better monitor activity by
authorized users, and issues alerts when someone is trying to access
sensitive information such as Social Security numbers.
By Martin J. Garvey
InformationWeek
Most businesses install firewalls to keep the bad guys from penetrating
their computer networks and systems and causing damage. But few
companies take aggressive action to closely monitor and manage the
activities of the users already on the network. Yet, security experts
say the threat from "insiders" is just as serious as those coming from
outside the company.
First Citizens Bank wanted a better handle on the activities of
authorized users and installed the Percept firewall system from
Covelight Systems Inc. Most firewalls just block malicious software and
issue re****ts or logs on the activity. "When something happened, they
didn't let us know right away," says Chip Wentz, senior VP of
information security at the bank. "Reading logs, we had to dedicate a
couple of people, then parse out the log, and run queries to do the
correlation."
Wentz wanted to know more about what was going on with the applications
on the network in real time, rather than just reading logs about what
already had happened. The Percept firewall can track the activity of
every authenticated user, capture in real time all logins and logouts,
and monitor every click of a Web site. "Now we're able to mitigate risk
up front, and we have in-depth visibility into what users are doing
with each app," he says.
A new version of Percept is being released on Monday, and Wentz says it
should let him more closely monitor activity on the network and do a
better job of correlating events with threat levels. The system also
will generate re****ts on users requesting sensitive data such as Social
Security numbers. Covelight says policy-compliance re****ts, combined
with real-time incident detection and notification, will alert
appropriate security administrators of violations of company policies
and other suspicious activity.
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Covelight Systems
Protecting the privacy, integrity, and confidentiality
of your critical web-enabled information.
http://www.covelight.com
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