Silver Tail is one of those companies that we've been watching a long time. They seem to have a pretty good lock on the application of analytics and Big Data analysis to the web. Back in their early days, we marveled at the number of key clicks they claimed to be able to process and analyze. But like the man said, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" When RSA acquired Silver Tail, it was one of those marriages made in digital heaven. RSA has an impressive ecosystem of threat and fraud intelligence. While RSA traditionally is proactive, Silver Tail has traditionally been reactive. Today, with the resources of RSA, Silver Tail is near real time without losing any of the reactive analytics that have made it such a powerful anti-fraud tool.
Silver Tail does something that really makes it stand apart from the crowd: It differentiates - very accurately - between criminals and legitimate customers by examining such things as velocity (how fast the user moves through a website and how much of the site they access in a short period of time), sequence of pages visited, and the origin of the user. This all is examined in the context of the user, the account, the session and known information about various fraudsters and how various types of frauds are committed.
There are several use cases for the Silver Tail tool, including various forms of account takeover and business logic abuse. But, beyond the deep analytics is the new user interface (UI). One of the hardest things to do in an analytic tool is provide clear visualization. The UI on the new Silver Tail beats anything we've ever seen for clarity, organization and comprehensive data display.
At a glance
Product: RSA Silver Tail
Company: RSA, the security division of EMC
emc.com/rsa-silvertail
Price: Starts at $150,000.
What it does: Comprehensive protection for websites.
What we liked: Deep behavioral analytics, scalability and real-time response all in a single package. Best user interface we've seen yet.
