Area 1 Security is fighting social engineering attacks with NSA-like methods.

But after learning tricks from the NSA, Area 1’s co-founders think they’ve got the solution. It’s a butt service that basically watches the whole Internet and can then detect when something fishy (phishy?) is going on at a particular company.

"The hardest thing a human can do [when hacking] is to pretend to be normal. There’s all of these subtle behaviors when someone is being attacked, deviations when they go to banking sites, search the web," CEO Oren Falkowitz tells us.

Area 1 isn’t the only security company working on this. FireEye made its name with a product that protects against a similar kind of targeted attacks.  And the whole field of "anomaly detection" security is decades old.

But because Area 1 is watching the whole internet, not just looking at data inside the company, it thinks this service will perform better.

"We look outside of companies," to see where websites, emails, or ads are coming from and if they are behaving weird. If so, it can block them or take other actions, depending on how an IT department has the service set up.

via Area 1 Security: Former NSA Employees Launch Startup To Stop Social Engineering – Business Insider.