IBM To Acquire Israeli Fraud Detection Firm Trusteer

Tech titan IBM has agreed to buy Trusteer, an Israeli security company focusing on preventing fraudulent financial transactions.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but Israeli paper Calcalist said it was in the hundreds of millions.

Trusteer, which uses a cloud database and reputational algorithms to detect threats and potential fraud, has gained top customers in the banking space since its formation in 2006, including HSBC and Santander. It claims to have nine of the top 10 UK banks as customers.

Its technologies sit on clients and inside organisations, alerting them when infected or suspicious devices are accessing their websites.

It has been building up a range of mobile protections as well, launching the Mobile Risk Engine in May, which does in-depth analysis of devices, including collection of geo-location and user behaviour data, in order to prevent fraudulent transactions.

IBM bets on Trusteer

IBM will both acquire the company and set up a new lab in Tel Aviv, the IBM Cybersecurity Software Lab. Over  200 Trusteer and IBM workers will carry out research and development at the facility.

“Trusteer’s expertise and superior technology in enterprise endpoint defense and advanced malware prevention will help our clients across all industries address the constantly evolving threats they are facing,” said Brendan Hannigan, general manager of the security systems division at IBM.

“Together with IBM’s capabilities in advanced threat detection, analysis and remediation, we will now be able to offer our clients several additional layers of defense against sophisticated attackers.”

Big Blue has acquired numerous security firms in recent years, its biggest being that of security analytics company Q1 Labs.

“Trusteer seems to make sense as an addition to IBM’s security portfolio,” Quocirca security analyst Bob Tarzey told TechWeekEurope.

“It fits with IBM’s desire to provide more and more on-demand services and to need to stay relevant as more and more end user computing switches to mobile devices.”

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