CA Labs and RMIT join together to fight crime

David Swan
Tuesday, 28 June 2011 14:51

Business IT - Security

CA Labs today announced it will work in collaboration with RMIT University on a project to protect both industry and government bodies from potential damage due to malicious acts by employees.

 

This partnership follows on from the Australian Research Council (ARC) recent award of $255,000 to RMIT University to perform research into detecting insider threats within organisations.

The Ernst & Young's 2010 Global Information Security Survey found 64% of organisations rate disclosure of sensitive information as one of their top five IT risks. By combining the expertise of computer security researchers from RMIT University and CA Labs, the aim of the team is to automatically detect the early warning signs of attacks by insiders in order to mobilise resources to effectively combat them.

'We've seen a number of high profile inside attacks in recent media that have caused immense damage. We're building a huge database of enterprise logs that we're correlating and analyzing to detect suspicious patterns of behaviour. This research will put Australia at the forefront of inside attack prevention and help secure Australia's critical IT infrastructure,' said Dr. Steve Versteeg, CA Labs Research Staff Member.

The research project will investigate fast and effective automated insider threat detection and prediction systems. The research team says that malicious attacks from insiders are the hardest to detect and can cause the greatest damage.

'Threats from insiders directly compromise the security, privacy and integrity of Australian e-commerce, large databases and communication channels. This project will provide an essential step in combating this type of criminal activity by developing methods to detect such threats and secure the public's information against exposure and identity theft,' Associate Professor Serdar Boztas from RMIT University, who is the lead chief investigator for the project.

Tim Brown, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Security for CA Technologies said, 'Insider threat detection is one of the most challenging technical issues faced by industry and governments today. We look forward to incorporating these research results into our security products to better meet our customers' needs.'

The project was recently highlighted by Senator Kim Carr, Australia's Minister of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, as a key research agenda item in the country's Linkage Projects.