Headlines:
Beachhead Software for Heritage of Calif. Cyota: AOL Will Help in Phishing Fight Baker Hill Buys Insight Analytics Group
Beachhead Software for Heritage of Calif.
The $1 billion-asset Heritage Bank of Commerce of San Jose has begun installing security software designed to destroy the data on employees' computers if they are stolen.
The vendor, the 2-year-old Beachhead Solutions Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., said Heritage is the first bank to use its Lost Data Destruction software, which it introduced in December.
Beachhead said the program requires the computers on which it is installed to check in with a network server at scheduled times. If the computer cannot do so or senses otherwise that it is in the wrong hands, it erases the hard disk as many as eight times - even though one erasure is enough to render 96% to 98% of the data unrecoverable, Beachhead says.
The treatment turns the stolen computer into "a brick," said Jim Obot, the vendor's chief executive.
Dick Coniff, Heritage Bank's president and chief operating officer, said, "It's a relatively harsh solution, I suppose," but "I don't think our concerns are any different" from those of others in the banking industry.
The installation began last month. The encryption that the Heritage Commerce Corp. subsidiary has been using provided less protection, Mr. Coniff said. "There are still ways to get around encrypted data."
"Encryption is dependent on compliance," Mr. Obot said. Users are "the weakest link in the security chain," and data can be readily decrypted if users expose passwords or leave security tokens with their computers, he said.
The bank has put the software on 30 computers, Mr. Coniff said. Most of them are laptops in its nine branches, he said; the rest are desktops at nine loan origination centers in rural areas.
The system can also wipe out only portions of a hard disk or put a computer into "a persistent shutdown" if there is a chance it will be recovered, but Mr. Obot said he does not recommend either option. "The only ultimate form of security is to eliminate your data," he said.
Cyota: AOL Will Help in Phishing Fight
Cyota Inc. of New York, which offers services meant to prevent online fraud, says a new customer, the giant America Online Inc. of Dulles, Va., will help it spot phishing scams.
Cyota's FraudAction service sorts through e-mail forwarded by clients to find messages meant to lure consumers to fake Web sites where they may be tricked into revealing personal information. Its corporate clients receive many of those messages from their customers.
When Cyota finds a phishing e-mail, it seeks out the associated Web site and tries to shut it down. Information from AOL, which has 22 million users, provides "a meaningful addition to the data we get every day," said Amir Orad, Cyota's executive vice president of marketing.
AOL, whose use of Cyota was announced last week, has long provided a "Report Spam" button for users to report receipt of an unsolicited advertisement or a suspect message. Cyota now has access to these reports.
Through alerts from Cyota, Mr. Orad said, most of the phishing sites it discovers are disabled within five hours. AOL customers can be protected even sooner, he said, because AOL can prevent its users from visiting specific sites.
"It's the equivalent of immediately - within a minute," Mr. Orad said.
Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for AOL, a Time Warner Inc. unit, said it had tried to block phishing e-mails and bogus Web sites before hiring Cyota. It did so "mostly through internal referrals" and mostly during work hours, he said. Cyota has "taken our fight against phishing to the next level."
Baker Hill Buys Insight Analytics Group
Baker Hill Corp. of Carmel, Ind., a banking software vendor, announced Monday that it had acquired Insight Analytics Group of Philadelphia, a management consulting firm that specializes in business process issues.
Financial terms were not disclosed; the buyer is privately held.
Insight Analytics' clients have included Umpqua Holdings Corp. of Portland, Ore.; National Penn Bancshares Inc. of Boyertown, Pa.; MBNA Corp. of Wilmington, Del.; and Barclays PLC, the British banking company, Baker Hill said.
Darshan Jain, the managing principal at Insight Analytics, has become the practice leader of Baker Hill's new Structured Metrics practice, named for Insight's automated process measurement system. Before founding the company in 2000, Mr. Jain was the director of internal consulting at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce of Toronto.
