Allina Health Recognized with 2019 CSO50 Award for Patient Data Privacy Project

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Gurucul, a leader in behavior based security and fraud analytics technology for on-premises and the cloud, today announced its customer Allina Health has been named an honoree in the prestigious 2019 CSO50 Awards from IDG’s CSO. Allina was recognized for a project that implemented User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to protect player and VIP medical records from “snooping” and theft during Super Bowl LII. This is the third consecutive year that a Gurucul customer has received a CSO50 Award.

.@Gurucul customer @AllinaHealth recognized with 2019 #CSO50 award for #patientdataprivacy project during Super Bowl LII that used #behavioranalytics to prevent unauthorized access to player and VIP medical records

The annual CSO50 awards recognize a select group of organizations for security projects that have demonstrated outstanding business value and thought leadership. Allina Health will be honored at a special awards dinner on April 10 during the CSO50 Conference + Awards at the Talking Stick Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. A full list of the CSO50 Award honorees is posted online at: https://bit.ly/2za5PCv. In addition, the project is highlighted in a short video at https://vimeo.com/265702796.“Healthcare data belonging to athletes and VIPs associated with the Super Bowl was extremely coveted on the black market by bettors, celebrity gossip outlets and others, and as such required even higher levels of privacy controls,” said William (Bill) Scandrett, Chief Information Security Officer of Allina Health. “Working with Gurucul we were quickly able to implement an analytics-based behavior monitoring system that could detect unauthorized access across a network used by thousands of employees, that contains millions of records.”

Allina Health is a non-profit healthcare system based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with more than 90 clinics, 12 hospitals and 15 retail pharmacies. The company partnered with Gurucul to deploy a patient data privacy protection solution that could monitor 50 million transactions per day. Using Gurucul’s UEBA technology, Allina is able to analyze user and entity (device) behavior at machine speed and identify anomalies associated with suspicious, malicious or unauthorized activity. Since the Super Bowl, Allina has extended the project’s scope to its complete network of hospitals, clinics and pharmacies. The Gurucul system is monitoring thousands of users, millions of patient records and more than 50 thousand entities including medical equipment, security cameras and mobile devices that connect to the Wi-Fi network.

“The Allina Health project was significant in its scope, scale and deployment time frame, since we had less than one week to roll it out before the Super Bowl,” said Saryu Nayyar, CEO of Gurucul. “It was such a success that Allina has extended Gurucul across its entire ecosystem. We are very pleased that the CSO50 Awards have recognized Allina for the many innovations, including entity behavior monitoring, they have put in place to protect patient data privacy.”

“This year’s class of CSO50 award winners raise the bar on security innovation,” said Amy Bennett, executive editor, CSO. “While delivering business value and demonstrating thought leadership are the metrics on which they are measured, the greater value is in the peer-to-peer sharing of ideas across a range of industries, across company sizes, for-profit and not-for-profit, public and private. The magic really happens on the stage at the CSO50 conference when these projects are brought to life in presentations and panel discussions. It is an honor to give them the recognition they deserve.”

About the CSO50 Awards
The CSO50 Awards recognizes 50 organizations for security projects and initiatives that demonstrate outstanding business value and thought leadership. The CSO50 Awards are scored according to a uniform set of criteria by a panel of judges that includes security leaders and industry experts. The 2019 awards will be presented at the CSO50 Conference + Awards, April 8- 10, 2019, at the Talking Stick Resort, Scottsdale, Arizona.

About CSO
CSO is the premier content and community resource for security decision-makers leading “business risk management” efforts within their organization. For more than a decade, CSO’s award-winning web site (CSOonline.com), executive conferences, strategic marketing services and research have equipped security decision-makers to mitigate both IT and corporate/physical risk for their organizations and provided opportunities for security vendors looking to reach this audience. To assist CSOs in educating their organizations’ employees on corporate and personal security practices, CSO also produces the quarterly newsletter Security Smart. CSO is published by IDG Communications, Inc. Company information is available at www.idg.com.

About Gurucul
Gurucul is a global cyber security and fraud analytics company that is changing the way organizations protect their most valuable assets, data and information from insider and external threats both on-premises and in the cloud. Gurucul’s real-time security analytics and fraud analytics technology combines machine learning behavior profiling with predictive risk-scoring algorithms to predict, prevent and detect breaches and fraud. Gurucul technology is used by Global Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies to fight cyber fraud, IP theft, insider threats and account compromise. The company is based in Los Angeles. To learn more, visit www.gurucul.com/ and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.