Here's Our Story

 

The year was 2008.  The world was reacting to a global economic downturn.  While enterprises took aggressive steps to weather the storm, criminal syndicates invested in innovation and gaps in cyber security emerged.  Under these conditions, the seeds of what would eventually become BioCatch were planted.

 

The concept for BioCatch was based on the idea that innovative attackers could breach security systems by creating false personas, leveraging Peter Steiner’s profound revelation that “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Avi Turgeman, who served in the prestigious Israel Defense Forces Unit 8200, set out to address this problem and the idea of creating an identity-theft safeguard was born.

 

Avi concluded that the only effective way to detect an online impostor is to verify his or her identity through a process of continuous biometric authentication. His research was based on a theory that the ways through which people interact with machines is unique and can be measured with relative accuracy. In other words, there is a correlation between online behavior – both physical and cognitive – and a person, and this behavior cannot be copied or replicated.

 

On the basis of this idea, BioCatch was founded in 2011, with Benny Rosenbaum as the CEO, and with the goal of eliminating the ability of "dogs" to masquerade as people and advancing the ability of organizations to prevent identity theft. The challenge was both frightening and energizing. Nevertheless, the team knew that by bringing this revolutionary concept to life it could change the world for the better.

 

The idea of analyzing keystroke dynamics and mouse movement was academic, with research reaching back more than twenty years.  But the practical applications of the theories were limited by the quality and complexity of measurable data.  The challenge was, therefore, to engineer a solution that would be able to collect data required for precise biometric analysis and do so throughout an online session, while ensuring a useful statistical error threshold (false-positive and -negative rates).

 

The threshold challenge had plagued historical attempts to create practical applications based on behavior science.  BioCatch overcame this problem by introducing Invisible Challenges™ which “force” users interacting with an application to engage in certain actions or tests which they are unaware they are performing.  These tests provide additional key data required to develop an accurate measure of a person’s identity.

 

By late 2013, armed with a solution that captured years of research, innovation and engineering, the company came out of incubation and emerged as an industry darling winning awards, accolades and the support of many of the most important companies in the world.  Make sure to follow us as we continue to grow and disrupt the cyber security industry.