EMC is beefing up its RSA security division with the planned acquisition of big-data-focused startup Silver Tail Systems. The company’s software detects malicious activity by monitoring and analyzing site visitors’ behavior in order to determine whether it’s harmless or potentially harmful. The company claims multiple large banking and e-commerce sites among its customers.
As I’ve explained before, big data and real-time security software are a match made in heaven because systems get smarter as they get more data to feed their predictive models. The more that security products know about what’s normal and what’s not, the more accurately they can identify threats. Specifically, Silver Tail’s suite of products can flag anomalous behavior in real time, thus letting security personnel decide how respond, but it also can apply rules to try and mitigate suspected attacks with CAPTCHAs or other authentication tools.
Silver Tail was founded in 2008 and had raised more than $ 20 million in venture capital from a number of firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Citi Ventures.
