Placing 2021 Bets on Zero Trust Identity & BehavioSec

It is an exciting time to join the BehavioSec team as Chief Revenue Officer.

In almost 20 years of working in the digital identity space around financial services and other sectors, I have seen successive key technologies emerge that enable and redefine how people securely bank, pay and prove authenticity in a digital world.

But 2021 stands out as an unprecedented jump ball opportunity for digital identity. Not only in terms of which devices are trusted and hardening our authentication capabilities – but the bigger challenge of proving a true, unique, humanperson in an app or service is who they say they are. It is hard to understate how vast a challenge this represents for cybersecurity and fraud teams, and how massive an opportunity this presents to vendors like BehavioSec who are ready and well positioned to help these teams with real solutions.

Even before COVID-19 struck the world, every organization concerned with consumer experience or employee productivity was racing to digitally transform – shifting their reach into more online, mobile form factors. In the last year, mobile and contactless mediums have become the world’s lifeline, sustaining commerce and employment, deliveries of food and clothing, and supporting public safety and health. Unfortunately, as with all progress in online engagement – there have been costs to both user experience and exposure to fraud.

BehavioSec believes that continuously establishing digital authenticity as part of digital transformation can improve commerce, lower risk and enhance lives everywhere. Following a 300% year of growth amidst a global pandemic, the company’s success shows that the market and our customers share our vision and behavioral is rapidly gaining traction.

And now as I join this company and look to our strategy to help as many organizations as possible meet these challenges, I’d like to share some insights on the two questions I get from both new prospects and old colleagues on why I’m placing my bets on behavioral and BehavioSec in 2021:

Why behavioral biometrics?

Today, proving digital identity is all about signals.  In the past these were challenge questions, watermarks on documents, location data or device ID’s – or more recently, fingerprints and facial recognition – all attributes that tag something, or someone, as unique. The problem is that as relevant as some of these signals remain, none of them can fully represent the innate human element across the full user experience – meaning – they offer only a fraction of visibility and are inevitably stolen and/or weaponized for Internet-scale cybercrime.

The stakes of the new mobile-driven world demand higher assurances – without breaking the user experience. This is a crucial point; if cumbersome identity verification steps make new services too hard to use, this undermines business growth and other net benefits – making it marginally better than loss of trust after a costly breach. Or, if we secure only the front gate with a simple lock, we’re collectively not protecting anyone.

To solve this, we must stay focused on the user experience and behavioral biometrics is perfect for this because it is security based on the user experience, itself. The high-fidelity, high-assurance signal of analyzing how users type, swipe and handle devices is an ideal defense against things cybercriminals synthesize or impersonate. Even if someone brute forces with a bot attack, SIM-swaps your phone, or puts keylogging code on your laptop to learn your relationships and passwords, they cannot tap a screen or move a cursor like the real you when they try to weaponize what they capture. Or, if they start coaching or compromise access post log-in to pivot to higher value targets, the signal still detects something amiss with the real account holder.

Why BehavioSec?

BehavioSec created and defined this category, from when the company was an inaugural RSA Innovation Sandbox Finalist, to gaining Gartner Cool Vendor recognition, to our 300% growth milestone year. This is no accident or lucky break and there are three key reasons why we lead:

(1)   We support Zero Trust Identity with “Continuous Authentication”

We invented “continuous authentication” and are the only behavioral biometrics provider ideally situated to play at every step in the end user journey.

Not only does BehavioSec defeat chronic threats like password trafficking and credential stuffing by rendering stolen login information useless, we detect suspect and malicious activity after login.  More importantly, unlike most vendors still focused on anomaly detection only, we truly profile and validate positive behavior.  As a result, our customers can ensure not only better authenticity at login, but that compromise does not happen with bad actors parking for weeks, months, or even years before taking their next nefarious steps. This ensures a higher fidelity and better real-time detection in the kill-chain, reducing noise and false positives or negatives.

(2)   We are a customer operations and partner-friendly company.

 Why? First, we don’t rip and replace. We augment and add a powerful behavioral analysis signal to their existing fraud, authentication, and cybersecurity platforms. Our approach offers fast time-to-value while complementing their existing investments for more ROI, which is good for our customers and for our partners.

Second, our solution is fully API-driven and built for easy deployment and consumption across on-prem virtual environments, Cloud, or bare metal according to customer requirements and compliance concerns. And third, we’re a pure-play, pure signal company offering the best of breed in behavioral biometrics signals that reduces operational noise of too many overlapping ‘platforms’ and ‘panes of glass’.

(3)   Our product and business relationships are the most mature by far in the marketplace.

We were the first-mover in this space and over time, have continued to grow our production-deployment experience with the world’s largest banks, under the most stringent regulatory environments and demanding high-availability use cases.

We’ve also invested significantly in our partner ecosystem over the past several years to ensure that our solutions are easy to integrate with existing identity and anti-fraud investments to provide quick ROI for our customers.

Fighting friction and fraud at once, with measurable gains and proven value – this is the hard-earned reputation and credibility BehavioSec earned from creating a category. Looking into 2021 across the market and technology landscape, I could not pass up the opportunity to join the company and make my bets here at the right time, at the right place. I invite you to reach out and share your thoughts on where this field is headed. Together we can challenge old assumptions and dispel uncertainties and constraints by making strong identity the center of secure and mobile digital experiences.

We have invested significantly in our partner ecosystem over the past several years to ensure that our solutions are easy to integrate with existing identity and fraud  investments and provide quick ROI for our customers.

Fighting friction and fraud at once, with measurable gains and proven value – this is the hard-earned reputation and credibility BehavioSec earned from creating a category. Looking into 2021 across the market and technology landscape, I could not pass up the opportunity to join the company and make my bets here at the right time, at the right place.

I invite you to reach out and share your thoughts on where this field is headed. Together we can challenge old assumptions and dispel uncertainties and constraints by making strong identity the center of secure and mobile digital experiences.

The post Placing 2021 Bets on Zero Trust Identity & BehavioSec appeared first on BehavioSec.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from BehavioSec authored by Michael Nelson. Read the original post at: https://www.behaviosec.com/placing-2021-bets-on-zero-trust-identity-behaviosec/