EMC Corp. announced it has signed an agreement to acquire privately-held Silver Tail Systems, a solution provider based in Menlo Park, Calif., with an expertise in real-time Web session intelligence and behavioural analysis.
Upon closing, Silver Tail will operate within the RSA security division and is expected to extend the capabilities of RSA’s Identity Protection and Verification (IPV) solutions, as well as other areas across RSA’s enterprise security portfolio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2012, subject to certain closing conditions. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2012 fiscal year.
One of the reasons EMC gave for this move is the rapid evolution of malware and advanced online threats has left growing numbers of online banking, ecommerce and government web sites and their customers vulnerable to attack, account takeover and fraud. EMC added that in response to this evolution organizations historically have focused on building fraud detection and security strategies that try to identify what a bad transaction looks like, creating solutions that must always play catch-up to the latest threats.
According to EMA Managing Research Director, Security & Risk Management, Scott Crawford, “Silver Tail represents a growing class of technologies meeting a strongly demonstrated need, making insight available as real-time defense derived from large bodies of behavioral data. Its acquisition by EMC signals the growing validation of data-driven security tactics, as enterprises – and the vendors that serve them – recognize that effective analytics are the key to understanding the evidence of threats that too often escape detection.”
Silver Tail Systems’ Web session intelligence is the response to this evolution in threats and fraud, using a Big Data-driven approach to gather and analyze mass quantities of information in real time and to see into Web sessions and mobile traffic. The information is fed into Silver Tail Systems’ behavior analysis engine to review at both user and population levels to detect anomalies, IT security threats, fraud, insider threats, business logic abuse and other malicious activity.
Silver Tail Systems solutions are currently deployed globally in large customer environments to secure online banking traffic and ecommerce and government web sites, for example.
Within RSA, Silver Tail is expected to contribute to multiple areas across RSA’s enterprise security portfolio. In addition, it is expected Silver Tail’s core transaction and behavioural analysis technology will help further extend the security analytics capabilities across RSA’s enterprise security solutions portfolio.