Anetac Targets Service Account Security

Nearly every organization struggles to monitor service accounts, tokens, application programming interfaces (APIs), and access keys to accounts that are scattered throughout its environment. Modern applications rely on APIs to bring in data and also to make data available to other services and applications. Developers relying on service accounts to authenticate applications with various services need to store them securely and monitor how the accounts are being used.

This is the problem Anetac, which came out of stealth today, hopes to solve with Anetac Dynamic Identity and Security Platform, a dynamic security and identity management solution for hybrid environments. Anetac aims to protect service accounts so that attackers can't use them to breach organizations. The streaming identity platform continuously discovers and monitors nonhuman and shared-use service accounts and allows security teams to identify and respond to incidents involving abused accounts. The solution maps access chains and relies on behavioral analysis to detect unusual activity.

Service accounts typically outnumber user accounts by "30-45 times," Anetac said in a statement. Issues such as large standing privileges, accounts shared across multiple teams, credentials not rotated regularly, and dormant accounts are all common challenges. For example, a retail organization deploying Anetac's technology discovered that 20% of provisioned accounts had never been used, 55% of all accounts were disabled, and 30% had passwords that were over a year old, according to Anetac. The platform also found hundreds of passwords that had been unchanged for over five years.

As part of the launch, Anetac also raised $16 million in funding from Liberty Global, Shield Capital, and GP Ventures. Anetac is working with organizations in a variety of industries, including airlines, banking institutions, educational centers, and mining. Anetac's co-founders, Tim Eades, Yi Sun, Meng Xu, Megan Withycombe, Colin Ross, and Diana Nicholas, all previously held senior roles in vArmour. Eades, CEO of Anetac, was previously CEO of Armour and Silver Tail Systems (acquired by EMC in 2012).