InfoWatch supports Raiffeisen Bank Russia in securing bank data confidentiality

By Svetlana Belyalova, Information Security Director, Raiffeisen Bank Russia

Internal data protection is one of the major issues for financial organisations. Banks handle significant amounts of personal information of existing and potential customers. This information must be thoroughly protected against disclosure, as such a disclosure inevitably leads to significant reputational and financial damage. Local and international standards, for example PCI DSS, require financial organisations to seriously address the problem of information security. In particular, sensitive information must be protected both while stored and transferred. All operations with the information should be monitored and recorded with the option of recorded data analysis.

“The solution helped us to prevent 369 information security violations during about half a year after implementation.”
-Svetlana Belyalova, Information Security Director

Customer

Raiffeisen Bank Russia is a daughter company of the Austrian banking group "Raiffeisen". The bank has operated in Russia since 1996, providing various financial services to both retail and corporate customers. Today, Raiffeisen Bank Russia is one of the most reliable financial institutions in the Russian market, with the BBB- rating according to Standard & Poor's. The bank is the member of major Russian and international associations, including Visa International Service Association and MasterCard International Incorporated. 

Challenges

To protect their sensitive data and comply with internal and external information security regulations, Raiffeisen Bank Russia needed a solution to control their e-mail flow. The bank set strict requirements for  the required solution: scalability for easy deployment across all bank branch offices, reliability to guarantee protection of sensitive data combined with uninterrupted e-mail exchange and long-term data storage feature to conduct investigations if required.

Solution

After careful study of all the competitive solutions, Raiffeisen Bank Russia turned to InfoWatch for the InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise product.

InfoWatch Traffic Monitor is a comprehensive software solution that gives enterprises full control over their information flow, controlling the data transmitted outside the corporate network via corporate or web-mail, web-pages, IMs, printed or copied to portable devices.

InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise intercepts email, Web, secure Web, IM, network printing traffic and makes shadow copies of data, copied to portable devices, removable media or sent to local printers.

The intercepted data is first analysed according to formal attributes, such as monitor type, sender/recipient, send date and time, etc. Then the contents of the data are extracted and analysed using several content analysis technologies. After analysis, the solution automatically makes the decision regarding how the intercepted object should be processed further - sent or blocked. The decision is met according to pre-defined security policies and rules. The solution allows sophisticated rule customisation. 

In the situation of a security policy violation, the security officer is notified. InfoWatch Traffic Monitor provides the security officer with comprehensive information on the intercepted object, without access to the actual information for personal confidentiality reasons. The security officer can confirm or change the system decision.

The intercepted data is stored in a centralised archive - Forensic Storage - for an unlimited duration. InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise allows the data to be traced: for transmission history and features; users' current activity monitoring (online queries); retrospective analysis and investigation (analytic queries).

Results

InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise was successfully integrated into the bank's IT infrastructure and is now actively used to control corporate e-mail exchange. The solution has proved to be easy to manage and maintain: several information security officers now easily control e-mail flow in all bank branch offices throughout Russia, ensuring no confidential data leaves the company via e-mail but, at the same time, allowing all regular business mail pass.. 

The solution helps Raiffeisen Bank Russia to minimise financial and other risks associated with information loss and ensure legal compliance to information security requirements.

In the first six months after installation 369 information security violations were prevented thanks to InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise.

Customer reference

"Reputational risks arising from confidential data loss are most important for a bank, as reputation counts among major assets of a financial institution. Bad reputation means no customers and no future.

DLP solutions are most effective today in protecting sensitive information against leakage. We decided to choose InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise, as it combines the most effective data analysis technologies, including linguistic analysis, digital fingerprints, analysis according to formal attributes and templates analyser. The complex application of these technologies provides the required by the bank information security.

InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise fully controls the outgoing e-mail flow (SMTP). Thanks to relevant data categorisation the solution installed in all our branch offices can be easily managed by several information security officers with the same high protection level. The solution helped us to prevent 369 information security violations during about half a year after implementation."