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When misbehavior is spotted, eSentry issues an alarm. Alarms can be "inline" or "offline." An inline alarm takes immediate action, such as forcing a user to reauthenticate himself, or locking the user out of an application. An offline alarm triggers good old-fashioned casework, such as an investigation led by fraud specialists.

While the banking industry seems like the most likely customer for eSentry, there are all sorts of applications where this type of "behavioral fingerprinting" could be useful. For instance, click fraud. A Web site that generates revenue from clicks can use eSentry to determine if thousands of clicks are coming from a single source. Or social networks like MySpace. Predators sometimes set up bots to try to establish chat sessions with dozens of kids at a time. This kind of repetitive behavior can be revealed and the traffic from the source blocked. Other applications that would benefit from this kind of technology would include e-commerce, online gaming and online gambling.

As misuse of the Internet and private networks becomes more sophisticated, our defense mechanisms need to grow in sophistication as well. Cydelity's eSentry is one more line of defense to prevent or stop unwanted behavior.

* For more about man-in-the-middle and other phishing attempts, read ""Sport phishing morphs into cybercrime wave" at NetworkWorld.com.

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