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Customer Story

Payroc – The Global Payment Processing Company

Founded in 2003, Payroc is a privately-owned global payment-processing company, dealing with more than $100 billion in annual transactions in over 40 countries, for more than 190,000 merchants. Like all financial institutions, Payroc takes cybersecurity extremely seriously, and continually invests to ensure it is up to date with the latest threats and technologies, to ensure it can effectively defend against cyberattacks.

Key challenges

  • A Need to Strengthen Identity-Based Threat Visibility. Gaining insight into the behaviour of thousands of individual accounts and addressing the industry cyberattack trend, stemming from identity exploitation and two-factor bypass.
  • Technology Compatibility and Compliance Pressures. Implement an advanced security solution that integrates seamlessly with existing IT infrastructure, particularly the support for phishing-resistant MFA, while maintaining compliance with evolving PCI DSS requirements.
  • Escalating Ransomware Threats. Strengthen defences against a global surge in highly sophisticated and targeted ransomware attacks, with identity as the attack vector.
  • Resource Optimisation. Enhance security posture with minimal strain on internal IT resources and operational capacity.

Key solutions

  • Regulatory alignment. Delivers full alignment of the latest PCI DSS identity-focused guidelines, ensuring regulation readiness.
  • Unified IAM infrastructure. Seamless identity ecosystem with visibility and inline protection to every identity, anywhere in the organisation.
  • Robust identity-threat defence. Reducing the risk of ransomware attacks by securing the most targeted layer of infrastructure, your users.
  • Quick, frictionless deployment. A platform designed for efficient deployment, low overhead, and zero disruption to business operations.
  • Powerful, flexible data interrogation. Extract and interrogate data to discover potential threats and make smarter security decisions.

Overview of the situation

Today, financial gain is the primary motivation in 95% of cyberattacks, with many threat actors directly targeting payment information. When it comes to the methodology of choice, cyber criminals tend to focus on a small number of tried and tested exploit principles. One of the most common is the ‘human’ aspect, because ultimately what’s needed is access to a username and password and their two-factor authentication. Success allows access to Cloud systems, VPN, email, and in some cases, can lead to Data Breaches and Ransomware.

Through its long-standing partnership with BlueFort Security, Payroc recognised the evolving threat associated with connecting individual user and system accounts to behaviours, evolving access control beyond access reviews, and cloud risk-based authentication systems. Payroc recognised the need for a next-generation identity system, allowing them to shine a spotlight on anomalies, and fortify their defences against the accelerating and evolving threats associated with organised cyber criminals.

As an organisation that processes cardholder data, Payroc must comply with PCI DSS regulation, which is an evolving security standard with a strong focus on access control, network security, and encryption, which many will recognise as the foundations of Zero Trust. An update to DCI DSS, which came into force in March this year, was the requirement for ‘phishing-resistant’ MFA. Many traditional MFA methods are now easily compromised, resulting in data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage.

Payroc decided to go beyond the requirement, not just securing MFA at the edge of the network. They recognised the need to secure every authentication request everywhere, all the time, both human and server, across all systems. However, while Payroc had a strong grasp of its accounts and mature monitoring in place, it was also possible to profile, monitor, and enforce identity-based authentication, as well as establish access boundaries based on system service account behaviour, all without re-architecting the underlying access platforms or protocols.

In short, it needed to not only monitor thousands of accounts in its access directory system, but it also wanted to understand the behaviour of those accounts in the organisation’s systems.

Quote marks

“Within a typical IT infrastructure, there are thousands of accounts, both human and service accounts. How do you look at that sea of information and know that the people in the organisation who have accessed the system are who they say they are, and if they’re behaving normally? Solving that problem is just so complicated, and that’s why so many cyberattacks go undetected until it’s too late.”

David Edwards, Vice President of Information Security, Payroc

BlueFort Security and Silverfort Solution

With a longstanding relationship built on trust and collaboration, BlueFort Security has worked closely with David Edwards’ team for years, gaining deep insight into Payroc’s business model, operational priorities, and IT landscape. This close partnership laid the foundation to deliver a shared objective: to build an intelligent layer of monitoring and insight around Payroc’s access directory.

Silverfort was selected as the strategic identity security platform for Payroc, not just for its seamless integration, but because it delivers end-to-end visibility, risk analysis, and granular access enforcement across every authentication activity with critical systems. It empowers Payroc to control, monitor, and protect identity access at scale.

During the six-week testing phase, Silverfort enforced sophisticated access and identity policies on systems that don’t natively support MFA, without the need to change or install agents. The Silverfort platform’s ability to deploy risk-based and end-to-end identity security across cloud and on-premises systems is helping hundreds of organisations tackle a rapidly growing problem.

With the testing completed, BlueFort Security’s service team partnered closely with David Edwards’ IT team to roll out the Silverfort platform. Thanks to its ‘out-of–the-box’ readiness, deployment was completed in under six weeks. Sensors were rapidly deployed across Payroc’s infrastructure, from where all accounts could be monitored. The result was accelerated time-to-value, minimal disruption, and immediate impact.

How BlueFort Made a Real Difference

BlueFort Security’s consultants pride themselves on their extensive knowledge of the UK’s cybersecurity and government-enforced regulations.

David Edwards, Vice President, Information Security, Payroc:

“BlueFort Security’s consultants are very knowledgeable in terms of the regulatory frameworks relevant to Payroc’s business. I’d describe them as subject-matter experts. They use this knowledge and experience to deliver the best possible outcome for their clients.”

BlueFort’s approach to its technology partners of choice also sets them apart, and contributed significantly to their long-term, successful partnership with Payroc. Not one to follow the crowd, its portfolio of carefully curated, tried and tested technology partners ensures it offers the latest in new (yet proven) technology, in addition to the established, better-known cybersecurity brands”.

David Edwards, Vice President, Information Security, Payroc:

“When it comes to technology, BlueFort has a unique ability to deliver the creative art of the possible.”

About BlueFort Security

BlueFort is the UK’s leading independent Security Solutions Partner (SSP). A unique combination of people and technology focused on simplifying your cyber journey. With a curated suite of tools, products, and skills, BlueFort partners with CISOs and SecOps teams to simplify, consolidate, optimise and transform their cybersecurity environments. Driven by industry-standard methodologies including NIST, ISO 27001, CyberEssentials+ and CTEM, BlueFort’s tightly integrated security disciplines deliver complete solutions that ensure continuous discovery, validation, and control for your organisation.

BlueFort Security, is a trusted cybersecurity partner and G-Cloud 14 supplier.

About Silverfort

Silverfort secures every dimension of identity. They are the first to deliver an end-to-end identity security platform that is easy to deploy and won’t disrupt business operations, resulting in better security outcomes with less work. Discover every identity across every environment, analyse exposures to reduce your attack surfaces, and enforce security controls inline to stop lateral movement, ransomware, and other identity threats.

See how BlueFort can help you simplify your cybersecurity

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