AdmitOne adds security to realtors' MLS listings

The foundation for security and enterprise management

Ten years ago I wrote that fingerprint, retinal scan, facial recognition, signature analysis and even keyboard entry analysis were catching on as replacements for traditional user name and password authentication. "Catching on" may have been a bit optimistic.

One of the companies I saw back then (it was at the 1998 Comdex show in Las Vegas) was NetNanny, the company that pioneered “keystroke dynamics” as a way to determine who was typing on the keyboard. That company went into bankruptcy and its assets eventually ended up with BioPassword, a company I wrote about a few years ago. Now BioPassword has gone through an identity change and emerged with a new name and a new direction (see “Where are they now?”).

AdmitOne is the new name and there's also a new management team. The core technology is still “keystroke dynamics” (see here for the technical explanation) but, as Matt Shanahan, AdmitOne senior VP of marketing and strategy told me last week: “Customers don’t buy technology, they buy solutions to their problems.”

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Ten years ago I wrote that fingerprint, retinal scan, facial recognition, signature analysis and even keyboard entry analysis were catching on as replacements for traditional user name and password authentication. "Catching on" may have been a bit optimistic.

One of the companies I saw back then (it was at the 1998 Comdex show in Las Vegas) was NetNanny, the company that pioneered “keystroke dynamics” as a way to determine who was typing on the keyboard. That company went into bankruptcy and its assets eventually ended up with BioPassword, a company I wrote about a few years ago. Now BioPassword has gone through an identity change and emerged with a new name and a new direction (see “Where are they now?”).

AdmitOne is the new name and there's also a new management team. The core technology is still “keystroke dynamics” (see here for the technical explanation) but, as Matt Shanahan, AdmitOne senior VP of marketing and strategy told me last week: “Customers don’t buy technology, they buy solutions to their problems.”

So, while AdmitOne continues to be strong in the online financial markets that BioPassword pioneered, a new emerging market is being created for online services, supply-chain services and subscriber-based services. Shanahan noted that Multiple Listing Services (MLS) used by the real estate industry have a real problem with clients sharing their usernames and passwords with non-clients thus depriving the MLS of potential revenue (see here for a novel take on this issue). AdmitOne’s new Security Scout is a hosted service which monitors the context of authentications – factors like location, platform, time and date, and more in addition to keystroke dynamics - so that a company can do deep analysis over possible shared accounts. (Go here for all the details.) There may be legitimate reasons for account sharing (husband-wife team, etc.), or not. Security Scout could even turn up evidence of hacked accounts used to pilfer resources or engage in industrial espionage!

I do like the technology – perhaps the new team, and the new marketing focus, will make AdmitOne a 10-year-old “overnight success.”

FUN STUFF: This came too late to include in the fun stuff I told you about before the holidays, but you still could spend a few minutes watching this great video developed for last year’s Novell BrainShare conference.

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

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.