Entrust buys antifraud startup business signatures

Authentication vendor Entrust Thursday said it acquired antifraud startup Business Signatures in a US$55 million cash and stock deal.

Business Signatures develops technology that allows financial institutions to guard against attacks on Web transactions, examining the HTTP data streams and identifying suspicious patterns that could indicate fraudulent activity, said Chris Voice, CTO at Entrust, Addison, Texas.

Entrust plans to weave Business Signatures' antifraud technology into its IdentityGuard authentication platform to offer a solution aimed at helping financial companies comply with the January 1 deadline imposed by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), Voice said.

Financial services organizations are struggling to better protect customers' identities, and their choices today are very limited from a technology perspective, according to Voice.

The addition of Business Signatures will enable Entrust to offer what it calls a 'Zero Touch Fraud Protection' solution, which lets companies add antifraud monitoring without requiring them to open up and modify their back end applications, which is especially important in the finance industry, said Voice.

"The Zero Touch solution passively monitors traffic and can see transfers as they're happening, which enables it to make realtime fraud detection decisions and identify suspicious transactions," said Voice.

Voice says Entrust acquired Business Signatures to stay ahead of the technology curve and the trend toward regulatory requirements that require multiple security technologies to protect data. "We believe that ultimately, [companies] are going to be required to integrate fraud detection with multifactor authentication," Voice noted.

Business Signatures, a 40-employee company, was founded in 2001 by former Oracle, Hewlett Packard and Cisco executives.