Software tracks use of data

A Spokane technology company has rolled out a software product that monitors possible misuse of corporate data inside a business’s walls and networks.

The company, NextSentry Corp., is a subsidiary of Next IT, the software company developing “smart” software for businesses and even for the U.S. Army. One of Next IT’s contracts is to add an interactive agent that guides visitors to relevant information on the Army’s recruitment Web site, GoArmy.com.

The NextSentry product, just released, will be marketed to banks and financial institutions to ensure employees don’t misuse data or allow information to reach the wrong hands, CEO Jim Hereford said.

Hereford quotes industry studies suggesting that up to 70 percent of security attacks and identity thefts are conducted by insiders or people posing as insiders.

He said NextSentry has two bank customers now and hopes to increase the list to 11 by year’s end.

One customer is Spokane-based Washington Trust Bank. Company Vice President and Chief Information Officer Jim Brockett said NextSentry’s security tool, ActiveSentry, will be installed eventually on 850 computers at its branches across the region.

Brockett said the bank has spent huge amounts of money to protect against outside hackers.

“We haven’t used technology to monitor and to watch for potential internal fraud, and that’s what we see this (product) doing,” he said.

Washington Trust has no plans to use the product to track productivity, he added. The goal is simply to track possible cases of workers gathering financial data that could be misused, he said.

The bank, with locations around the Northwest, has no problems with internal fraud or misuses “that we know of,” Brockett said.

The Gartner Group, a research firm, has reported that bank accounts nationwide were looted of $2.4 billion during 2004, with more than 1 million adults affected. It did not say how much of that loss came from internal data theft.

Most large and midsize banks use firewalls and assorted layers of protection to stop internal and external threats, Hereford said.

“What sets us apart is our solution resides right at the desktop, and it’s unobtrusive,” he said. The software, which is installed on individual computers, tracks any effort to take restricted data and copy, e-mail, print or transfer it to other devices, Hereford said.

ActiveSentry includes a management dashboard so administrators may load the software on desktops without detection, Chief Technology Officer Sam Fleming said.

Hereford said he doesn’t see NextSentry turning profitable until 2007. For now, the company will focus on selling the product and related services for banks that are ready to spend a minimum of $50,000, Hereford added.

NextSentry will have 17 employees, with Next IT’s head count coming to about 35. Both firms will share offices in the Paulsen Building in downtown Spokane.

The decision to move the two divisions in separate teams was reached in the past year.

“It became clear it made more sense to (change the company structure) so that we would have more success reaching customers,” Fleming said.