InfoWatch
Securing Data for Financial Institutions

In present times, the data volumes are growing exponentially and data protection and security are some of the essential factors that organizations, especially the banking sector is trying to enforce. With filial structures, numerous employees, multiple channels of service delivery and the concept of BYOD spreading its wings in the financial sector, banks continue to be vulnerable to external and internal threats which could be catastrophic given the huge financial and reputational losses at stake. To operate with such volumes of data, banks have to use a variety of data leakage and advanced persistent threat solutions. Moscow–based InfoWatch is solving the problems faced by the banks and financial sectors to a great extent by providing solutions for data security and enabling a better understanding of the internal and external flow of information.

“The main challenge for software developers is to provide an all-in-one solution that will protect from internal and external threats and will also be secure and that is exactly what we offer at InfoWatch,” states Vadim Kuznetsov, International Sales Director, InfoWatch. He continues, “According to InfoWatch Analytic Center’s Data Leakage Report 1st half 2015, banks and financial institutions showed 50 percent of data leaks in the researched period, and 50 percent among those leaks being malicious, with personal data and payment details being accessible to intruders.”

InfoWatch’s Content Filtering Database (CFD) detects confidential information sent outside the bank’s system. It helps to detect accuracy of sensitive data, decrease time for product deployment and accelerate completion and revision of the solution. At the outset, a database is created with morphological forms of words connected with banking. “Therefore, re-naming internal documents, changing letters or shortening words does not stop the product from detecting data leakage, and assures the same level of protection as with manual data analysis of each document,” affirms Kuznetsov.

Besides, to protect organizations against external threats like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, hacking, malware and other vulnerabilities, InfoWatch offers its modular solution InfoWatch Attack Killer. It is an automated, self-learning, integrated solution where each module can either be used independently or in combination.

We have departments of analysts and pre-sales technical specialists, which tailor DLP solutions in accordance with the customer requirements

Social media and mass media are also influencing the banking sector. One of InfoWatch’s products, KRIBRUM, allows tracking society’s opinions, thus giving companies’ time to prepare against a reaction or change and save them against reputation and financial losses.

The key differentiating factor of InfoWatch is its technical advancement in linguistic analysis, pre-DLP (Data Loss Prevention) technologies and research. “We have departments of analysts and pre-sales technical specialists, which tailor DLP solutions in accordance with the customer requirements,” explains Kuznetsov. He further adds, “We have consulting experts to explain, teach and provide business compliance with local information security regulations.”

In a particular instance, one of the banks in Bahrain required an industry-proven solution to safeguard its confidential information against “zero day” vulnerability and other improper distribution. The bank wanted a solution that supports Arabic language, and has the ability to comply with general and banking industry-specific information security standards and regulations. The firm’s efficiency of DLP was demonstrated within 72 hours of deployment and InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise successfully prevented an internal security policy breach. The incident was identified, blocked, captured and analyzed by InfoWatch proprietary Decision Making Engine, and then the incident was stored in InfoWatch Forensic Storage Archive for further processing.

Moving ahead, InfoWatch will continue researching behavioral analysis and ways to protect businesses from data loss. “Our mission is to help enterprises protect their corporate information and IT-infrastructure from various threats including data leakage and targeted attacks and decrease business risks from IT-side,” concludes Kuznetsov.