Raymond James Financial Selects Damballa as Defense against Botnets and Advanced Threats

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Damballa Inc., the company transforming the fight against cyber threats, today announced that Raymond James Financial has selected Damballa® Failsafe to defend against botnet breaches and other cyber threats that rely on advanced malware and network-based command-and-control (CnC).

Raymond James Financial, headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, is a financial services holding company with subsidiaries engaged in investment, financial planning, investment banking and asset management. Raymond James employs more than 5,300 financial advisors serving nearly two million accounts in more than 2,300 locations throughout the United States, Canada and overseas.

“We recognize the nature of today’s advanced threats,” said Todd Ferguson, enterprise information security architect for Raymond James. “Botnets have been, and show every indication of continuing to be, the criminal operators’ vector of choice. One commonality all of these threats seem to have is their need to communicate and be controlled to further the criminal operator’s end. Many of the traditional detective and protective measures face challenges in identifying the shear velocity of new threats.”

Damballa Failsafe utilizes a best-in-class Threat Reputation System along with advanced predictive analysis to detect communications between criminal operators and bot compromised assets within an enterprise. By monitoring DNS, proxy and egress traffic Damballa Failsafe can identify malicious CnC activity and network traffic behavior that indicates the presence of advanced malware.

“We evaluated a number of alternatives and selected Damballa because we believe their solution best fits our environment by focusing on the CnC infrastructure the criminals use to orchestrate botnets and exfiltrate data - providing an innovative approach to identifying the presence of advanced malware,” said Ferguson. “Damballa becomes an essential layer in our defense-in-depth infrastructure by providing unique visibility into our environment.”

“Botnets represent a serious threat to enterprises, particularly a higher potential for data loss and industrial espionage,” says Lawrence Orans, Gartner research director. “Gartner believes that bot delivery mechanisms will remain the dominant threat for high-impact attacks through 2012. Whether it is industry or platform-targeted malware like Stuxnet or more target-agnostic botnets such as the proliferation of Zeus-based attacks, cyber crime is a war that must be taken seriously.”

“The need to protect customer and confidential data within the financial services industry is clear, and we are excited that Raymond James has selected Damballa,” says Val Rahmani, CEO of Damballa. “We are seeing the leading companies in every sector recognizing the need to evolve their approach to protecting their users, customers and data. They know that the criminal operators have great financial motivation to continue to advance their exploitation techniques and to ensure that the malware they deploy cannot be detected. Security-conscious organizations understand that Damballa provides a unique solution for these threats.”

About Damballa

Damballa is a pioneer in the fight against cyber crime. Damballa provides the only network security solution that detects the remote control communication that criminals use to breach networks to steal personal and intellectual information, and conduct espionage or other fraudulent transactions. Patent-pending solutions from Damballa are platform and system-agnostic, protecting networks with any type of device including PC, Mac, smart phone, as well as mobile and embedded systems. Damballa customers include Fortune 1000 companies, Internet and telecommunications service providers, government agencies and educational organizations. Privately held, Damballa is headquartered in Atlanta. http://www.damballa.com