Israeli Startup BioCatch Tracks Online Behavior, Human Memory To Catch Cybercrooks

By Shoshanna Solomon, The Times of Israel August 17, 2016 2 minutes

Cyber Security via Reuters

This article was first published by The Times of Israel and was re-posted with permission.

Did you know that everyone has a distinctive way of moving a mouse, tapping a phone or typing on a keyboard? Moreover, when you identify yourself to your bank or an online store by inserting information about yourself, like your home address or date of birth, you are using long-term memory rather than short-term, and this can be seen from the way you interact with your computer or smartphone.

In fact, that’s what Israeli start-up BioCatch uses to distinguish the bad guys from the good guys.

The company’s latest product, which is already deployed in a set of tier-one banks and eCommerce customers, “differentiates between good users and criminal users, for situations where there is no historic data about these first time visitors,” said Avi Turgeman, the founder of Tel Aviv-based BioCatch, a financial security tech firm.

The company has already been selling software that checks over 500 bio-behavioral, cognitive and physiological parameters to create unique user profiles — and an individual web presence — for visitors to banking and eCommerce sites.

BioCatch is able to continuously authenticate users at every stage of an online banking session by analyzing these parameters, including hand tremors, eye-hand coordination, and how a person moves a mouse, combined with behavioral traits such as usage preferences and device interaction patterns. This enables the creation of what BioCatch calls a Cognitive Signature, a sum total of all the factors that go into an interactive session.

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BioCatch’s technology can record all this information, associating it with the user who is logged in and interacting with the site. In this way, banks or e-commerce sites can be alerted if the person performing the actions isn’t who they should be, for example. The company has already been marketing its continuous authentication software and its malware detection products to banks and other customers globally.

At the end of 2015, there were more than 33 million banking customers globally using the company’s behavioral biometric software, the company said. Its customers include some of the largest banks and eCommerce sites in Europe, Latin America and North America.

BioCatch’s latest software, called Criminal Behavior, comes at a good time. Cyber crime will cost businesses over $2 trillion by 2019, market analyst Juniper Research has forecast, almost four times the cost of breaches in 2015.