
“By then everyone has purchased all their gifts and there isn’t anything happening online.” Pretty much any other day will see all sorts of attacks that are keyed to the calendar: Valentine’s Day, the Olympics, Easter, whatever. “The least amount of fraud always happens right on Christmas Day,” he says. He has been with RSA for eight years and has seen all types of criminal behavior. “We now get a lot more social engineering than in the past, and the criminals are getting craftier, too,” says the center's director Daniel Cohen. David Stromĭaniel Cohen, RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center director
RSA RISK ENGINE SOFTWARE
Another several hundred staffers tend to the algorithms and software that is used to screen the various transactions.
RSA RISK ENGINE FULL
The AFCC processes about 100 million transactions a day, and it finds about 0.1 percent of them have potential fraud elements.Ībout 100 analysts staff three full shifts that work out of the center for monitoring and notification functions. The best situation is to anticipate fraudulent activity before it has any monetary impact, so that both bank and customer are protected from any eventual harm. The idea behind the center is to proactively monitor a bank’s transactions and notify RSA’s banking clients when something is amiss. The center is located outside of Tel Aviv and has a second facility operating on the Purdue University campus in Indiana that is mostly staffed by students. If you think about phishing attacks or account compromises for banking customers, that will put you in the right frame of mind. The center is part of RSA’s consumer division, which has a series of products not intended for consumer use but for defending consumers' endpoints that are targeted for fraud. RSA bought Cyota in 2005, and RSA in turn was gobbled up by EMC and then Dell two years ago. The center began its life in 1999, when it was created by a company called Cyota. The AFCC is an example of what a state-of-the-art web threat and fraud intelligence operation looks like. I had an opportunity while I was in Israel to visit RSA’s Anti-Fraud Command Center (AFCC), the nerve center of a division that is devoted to protecting consumers' financial records and funds. As cybercriminals get better at compromising financial accounts and stealing funds, vendors are beefing up their defensive tools to prevent fraud and abuse.
