Software targets internal leaks

A new company that was recently spun out of a larger software maker this week will announce a product designed to protect companies from internal security and information leakage threats.

NextSentry in February became a wholly owned subsidiary of Next IT, makers of artificial intelligence-based software designed to add selfservice features to Web sites, which has been used to help government agencies track illegal activity over the Internet. In June, NextSentry will release ActiveSentry, which uses artificial intelligence to learn an employee's role within an organization to determine when that employee may be violating company policy, says CEO Jim Hereford.

The company is targeting the financial industry with this release, but plans to expand the product in future releases to protect intellectual property, medical information and other types of sensitive data, he says.

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A new company that was recently spun out of a larger software maker this week will announce a product designed to protect companies from internal security and information leakage threats.

NextSentry in February became a wholly owned subsidiary of Next IT, makers of artificial intelligence-based software designed to add selfservice features to Web sites, which has been used to help government agencies track illegal activity over the Internet. In June, NextSentry will release ActiveSentry, which uses artificial intelligence to learn an employee's role within an organization to determine when that employee may be violating company policy, says CEO Jim Hereford.

The company is targeting the financial industry with this release, but plans to expand the product in future releases to protect intellectual property, medical information and other types of sensitive data, he says.

The desktop software monitors employee actions for distribution of sensitive information via e-mail, instant messaging, blog postings, file transfers, printouts or saving to removable storage devices. The software is based on a context-based engine called ContextIQ that aims to understand a user's intent; for example, a user cutting and pasting bank account information from one banking application to another would appear normal to the software, but cutting and pasting such information into a Web browser could raise a flag.

"Banks have spent a lot of time and energy solidifying the external perimeter from the security perspective, but the second piece of that is the internal part," says Jim Brockett, senior vice president and CIO of Washington Trust Bank, which has $3 billion in assets and 900 employees. His company has been using ActiveSentry for about a year, from when the product was owned by Next IT, and says when he began looking for such a product, it was the only one he found.

Today NextSentry competes with a few other vendors, including Oakley Networks - another start-up with roots in the government sector - and Vericept.

ActiveSentry includes a management dashboard so administrators can install and uninstall the software on desktops without detection, as well as manage policies and create reports. ActiveSentry is priced starting at $50,000 for a typical enterprise.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.