TriGeo Customer Boosts Security With Appliance

For many financial institutions, keeping up with federal regulations is getting harder and harder to do, and keeping tabs on network security risks and breaches has become more critical than ever.

For LegacyTexas Bank, a midmarket financial institution based in Plano, Texas, it was time to stop poring over event logs and start automating some of the process. That's why the bank decided to implement a security appliance from TriGeo Network Security, a vendor that provides Security Information and Event Management (SIEM).

According to LegacyTexas, the bank's significant growth over the past several years was another key factor in ratcheting up and automating its security efforts. LegacyTexas had seven branches and about $800 million in assets just six years ago; today it has 19 locations and $1.5 billion in assets.

"On top of that, our IT department supports more than just the bank," said Jon Drake, CIO of LegacyTexas, in an interview. "We have mortgage, title, insurance, and wealth advisory groups well. We decided to be proactive about security instead of reactive, so we can prevent problems from ever happening in the first place."

Drake said he knew right away that TriGeo's offering was the right one for LegacyTexas because it went beyond collecting logs and reporting results. With TriGeo's SIEM appliance, specific actions can be taken based on log results. For example, if two password entry attempts are made in a very short span of time--say, a second or two--the TriGeo appliance interprets this to mean that password cracking technology is being used (as no human could enter two passwords that quickly). The system disables the MAC address of the network where the password entry attempt is being made.

Another thing LegacyTexas likes about the TriGeo offering is that it puts all logs in the same format. "Every device creates a different log with a different format and a different look and feel," Drake said. "This solution accumulates them all and standardizes them in the same presentation, so we can parse the log data much more easily."

"LegacyTexas Bank is a great example of a company that understands the value of SIEM and the network visibility it provides companies beyond traditional log management," said Michelle Dickman, president and CEO of TriGeo. "The technology and support we provide [the LegacyTexas team] has helped the bank stay ahead of potential breaches, meet FFIEC and FDIC requirements, and gain an upper hand in audits."

In the "old days," before implementing the TriGeo appliance, the bank had two staffers report to work at 7 a.m. to go through the logs manually and seek out anomalies, Drake said. "Those [employees] spent an hour each, five days a week, going over the logs, and they probably hit only 1% of the records. Plus they were looking just at logs that appeared abnormal, so a lot of [suspect activity] was being missed." Today, the TriGeo appliance inspects all the logs and reports anything that's amiss. The result? Fewer (wo)man-hours wasted and much tighter network security.