NetWatcher
Easy to Use and Affordable Cyber Security for the Mid-Market

Financial services is one of the top targeted industries by cyber criminals today. Hackers are constantly looking for user credentials, personal data, and confidential account information. While large financial firms have numerous options to address these problems, Scott B. Suhy, CEO, NetWatcher, points out that, “Mid-market firms have limited options for the cyber security protection they so desperately need. Solutions are simply not designed for the mid-market because they are either too costly to buy and maintain, overly complicated to understand and use and hard to install. These solutions may also require cyber security engineering talent that is either extremely expensive or difficult to find,” adds Suhy.

NetWatcher is a Reston, Virginia-based firm with a solution that helps mid-market financial services firms achieve their end-to-end security objectives. NetWatcher takes advantage of the elasticity and power of the cloud for continuous cyber threat monitoring, intrusion detection, active scanning, log monitoring (SIEM), net-flow analysis, event management and endpoint integration. NetWatcher provides a financial services organization with actionable threat intelligence that immediately benefits their business.

“We built NetWatcher from ground up to be easy to install and use, incredibly accurate for low false positive rates, and affordable,” says Suhy. The company helps financial firms identify and address ‘cyber promiscuity,’ which is the unintentionally risky online behavior that occurs at the individual employee level. As a Security-as-a-Service platform, NetWatcher enables customers to deal with the weak link in their security— employee’s behavior on the Internet. NetWatcher identifies not only problems but also their root causes, alerting companies when employees inadvertently or intentionally put private information at risk. Customers get both a Security Health Score and a Cyber Promiscuity Score per asset to discover problem areas and spot potential breaches before they occur.

Since most mid-market financial firms use a blend of both on-premise and cloud solutions, NetWatcher offers different deployment scenarios.

We built NetWatcher from ground up to be easy to install and use, incredibly accurate for low false positive rates, and affordable

First, when sensors are connected to a mirror port and listening to the network, the platform helps traffic traverse the sensor's interfaces to get it inspected and tested against the signatures and then forwarded if it is determined to be safe. Second, when computers/servers are running on NetWatcher endpoint code with no sensors, the endpoints talk directly to sensor-in-the-cloud. Finally, when sensors and computers/servers are running on NetWatcher’s endpoint code, it offers end-to-end visibility into users’ assets.

In one instance, just 20 minutes after installing NetWatcher’s sensor, a venture capital firm realized it had nefarious command and control software on several partners’ machines. A general counsel at a Wall Street firm installed software he thought offered a secure VPN, but it was sending nefarious traffic through his laptop; the company was able to detect this problem soon after installing NetWatcher.

Currently, NetWatcher is building out an app store for access to 3rd party solutions such as user-based analytics and data loss protection as part of its platform. With this app store, NetWatcher will enable third parties to distribute their secure applications to the company’s customer base. “We also have a vulnerability scanner and netflow tools in beta that will soon be added to the platform,” says Suhy.

“If we are going to democratize cyber security we need to make it easy to use, accurate and affordable for all size businesses, not just very large ones— and NetWatcher has already made great inroads in this regard,” concludes Suhy.