“Financial institutions currently face an unrelenting assault of sophisticated threats from external and internal sources,” says ThetaRay CEO Mark Gazit. “They have the daunting task of making sense of billions of transactions across myriad data sources to detect both known and unknown threats. Unfortunately, existing systems rely on rules and signatures, so they can only operate on what is known. A new generation of threats requires a new breed of security solutions that can detect not only pre-existing threats but also the ‘unknown unknowns’.”
This is where ThetaRay comes in. ThetaRay’s financial solutions employ unsupervised machine learning to detect a vast range of unknown threats, including fraud, money laundering and ATM hacking – with laser-sharp accuracy and industry-low false positive levels. They can also help banks to exploit opportunities — for example, by identifying valuable new customers whose credit scores only show half the story. And this approach is working: ThetaRay’s customers include some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions.
The secret is in the math; ThetaRay’s platform uses proprietary algorithms developed by two of the world’s most renowned mathematicians over a 15-year period. It begins with no assumptions or bias regarding what data is important, how an attacker should behave, or even what constitutes a threat. After establishing a baseline, the algorithms are able to rapidly analyze massive amounts of hyper-dimensional, multi-domain big data, uncover hidden links between seemingly benign transactions, and highlight anomalies that suggest illegal activity is taking place.
The result is reduced risk and increased efficiency.
The Solutions
ThetaRay offers three financial services solutions:
- Anti-Money Laundering – BSA-AML regulatory requirements are becoming increasingly stringent while criminals are stepping up evasion schemes and diversifying their channels. ThetaRay’s AML solution automatically analyzes data from multiple domains and alerts compliance teams at the very first sign of suspected money laundering and/or terrorism financing activities. It also detects high-risk customers, accounts and actions, and identifies inconsistencies in KYC risk scores across all processes and databases.
- Fraud – Fraud is one of the most significant problems faced by the financial sector, expressed in hard costs, reputational damage and reduced customer loyalty. ThetaRay counters fraud risk by monitoring every kind of transaction across the organization. In real time, it detects both external and internal fraud among the millions of legitimate transactions processed daily between banks and other commercial entities. ThetaRay detects all types of fraud, including loan, payments, credit, digital/online and check fraud.
- ATM Security – Thetaray automatically identifies abnormal activities hidden among immense, multi-source data sets across the ATM network, enabling rapid remediation of attacks and operational disruptions.
The Benefits
ThetaRay’s approach has a number of advantages over competitive solutions, including:
- Superior Unknown Threat Detection – Thetaray’s field-proven solutions are characterized by high detection rates with extremely low false positive levels. They are specifically designed to identify unprecedented threats, using completely rule-free, math-based detection that does not rely on any patterns, signatures or heuristics.
- Bank Protection Inside and Out – ThetaRay is the only solution that detects anomalies and threats originating from within (insider-based) and from external attackers, by continuously and simultaneously analyzing thousands of parameters/dimensions from multiple domains, including networks traffic, payment servers, DHW tables, key customers’ services data, employee activities and more.
- Automatic Detection of the First Signs of Threats – Real-time threat detection enables customers to identify the earliest signs of hidden threats within seconds, and take action before any impact to key services, revenues or brand can occur. The detection process – from the moment new data is received through anomaly detection and alert generation – is completely automatic and does not require any manual intervention or big data expertise.
- Rapid Threat Mitigation – Auto-generated forensic information (including an anomaly score, the exact transaction/record in question, the parameters triggering the alert, and similar events in the data) provides security, compliance and business operations teams with the means to rapidly investigate and mitigate detected threats.
- Future-Proof Protection – Because they have no rules or thresholds to set or update, ThetaRay’s solutions are always up to date, enabling banks to seamlessly detect future threats. ThetaRay is ideally suited to detect transformed threats (mutated malware, altered money laundering-related activity, etc.) and completely new ones (new types of transaction fraud, new business process anomalies, etc.).
- One System, Many Applications – By leveraging ThetaRay’s context-based detection and ability to massively scale to support new environments and data sources, different organizational departments can utilize the same system to address their own use cases. For example, while security analysts might use the technology to protect against cyber attacks and fraud, compliance departments could use it to monitor money laundering activities, and business operations to detect anomalous mortgage processes and dealing room trader activities.
ThetaRay’s solutions easily integrate with existing customer systems, including customer data sources, storage servers, and investigation and management systems. Key functionality includes data processing and storage, automatic anomaly detection, alert generation/distribution, event investigation, and automated reporting and management. ThetaRay is available as a virtual or physical appliance, or cloud-based, supporting flexible deployment scenarios, including distributed on-premise and centralized/private cloud.
