CA secures physical and electronic environments

ORLANDO - Computer Associates Monday unveiled the latest in its line of security software to help users defend against attacks. CA's new weapon guards against a company's internal offender.

CA's eTrust 20/20 provides users "vision" into both the physical and the electronic layer of security, CA President and CEO Sanjay Kumar told CA World attendees in Orlando. He explained the disconnect between these two aspects of security and how CA now plans to fully address the problem.

"Until now there was no technology that brings the two together," Kumar said. "Based on information already collected, CA can now visually identify for users behavior that can be deemed as abnormal."

ETrust 20/20 collects data from log files already existing on sales, accounting, human resources, client information, e-mail and Web systems. The software aggregates the data in one repository and uses CA's Neugents and Aion technology on the back end. CA's Neugents neural network technology is a predictive tool to help users see where a trend may occur based on typical behavior. The technology heads up CA's line of intelligence software. Aion is CA's rules engine that users can configure to track their own access policies.

The idea behind eTrust 20/20, according to Kumar, is to reduce the need to constantly watch users and how they access the system. The software collects information from other monitoring tools and data logs, aggregates it and applies the Neugents and Aion technology to distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior, based on, for example, an employee's typical actions in the workplace.

"I know I don't like the idea of someone always watching everything I do while I'm at work, because I'm probably not doing anything wrong," Kumar said. "This tools gives companies a better way to pick up on behavior that isn't OK."

The software uses a graphical interface that can show network security managers where and when an employee accessed their building's physical infrastructure and how that employee spent the day using the company's systems. ETrust 20/20 will alert of abnormal behavior, as well as full-blown security breaches, and with a playback feature, users can see exactly when and where and for how long an offender violated corporate security policies. The software also stores user and event data.

Contact Staff Writer Denise Dubie

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