Silver Tail Systems

Silver Tail Systems, founded in 2008 by Laura Mather and Mike Eynon, established itself as a provider of web session intelligence and behavioral analytics to counteract online fraud. The founders' journey originated from their shared experience on the anti-fraud team at eBay and PayPal. Frustrated by constantly reacting to criminals, Mather, who served as Director of Fraud Prevention at eBay, identified the need for a new set of tools to proactively combat sophisticated online attacks. This direct exposure to the evolving tactics of cybercriminals was the catalyst for creating Silver Tail Systems. The company secured strategic investments from notable backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Citi Ventures, and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

The firm's core business centered on providing real-time predictive analytics to protect large-scale websites from cybercrime and fraud. It served prominent clients in the financial services, e-commerce, and government sectors, including brands like Microsoft, Bank of America, and Apple. The business model was subscription-based, offering its products either as on-premise installations or as a SaaS solution. Silver Tail’s technology addressed a critical gap in the market by focusing on the 'navigation layer' of web security, analyzing entire user sessions rather than just individual transactions. This big-data-driven approach allowed it to model normal user behavior and detect anomalies that indicated malicious activity such as insider threats, business logic abuse, and account takeovers. Its products could analyze hundreds of thousands of clicks per second to provide a real-time risk score for every web session.

The company's primary offering was its Forensics platform, which used behavioral analytics to create models of normal website traffic and identify suspicious behavior. A key feature, the Web Session Intelligence technology, provided deep visibility into both web and mobile traffic, allowing clients to distinguish between legitimate customers and attackers. This system was designed for rapid deployment, enabling clients to see value within days. In October 2012, Silver Tail Systems announced it had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by EMC, to be integrated into its security division, RSA. The acquisition, completed in December 2012, was intended to merge Silver Tail's behavioral analytics capabilities with RSA's existing identity protection and verification solutions.

Keywords: behavioral analytics, web session intelligence, fraud detection, cybercrime prevention, real-time analytics, user behavior analysis, business logic abuse, anti-fraud, navigation layer security, online banking security, ecommerce security, threat detection, clickstream analysis, risk-based authentication, big data security, man-in-the-browser detection, RSA Web Threat Detection, identity protection, predictive analytics, insider threat detection