As sophisticated as hackers have become in recent years, traditional external attacks against the corporate network are still overshadowed by the threat from malicious insiders, who account for a massive 43 percent of data breaches in the enterprise according to an Intel Corp. study released last quarter. The latest startup to take a shot at lowering that figure is Fortscale Security Ltd., which has seized the surging investor interest in network protection to add $4 million to its coffers through a new financing round announced this morning.

The investment comes only a week after ProtectWise Inc.  secured $20 million to help fund the development of additional features for its cloud-based intrusion detection service, which uses machine learning to find anomalies in the traffic crisscrossing an organization’s on-premise infrastructure. Fortscale applies the same approach to monitoring the end-users who produce the bulk of that traffic. Its security algorithms follow the everyday activity within the corporate network to understand what constitutes normal behavior for employees and use that insight to single out actions that break the pattern.

Signs of malicious activity can be subtle as a single user out of the thousands in an organization suddenly beginning to access an important database slightly more frequently than before or an administrator creating secondary management accounts for no apparent reason.  The software continuously updates its reference point as the corporate network evolves over time to identify when such behavior isn’t merely the result of changing work patterns and automatically brings the offending users to the attention of the security team using a built-in alerting system.

Fortscale’s focus on accuracy kills two birds with one stone, improving detection rates while reducing the risk of false positives, which allows network protection professionals to focus on tackling the real threats to their organization and thus further streamlines incident resolution. The new $4 million in funding from futures trading giant CME Group Inc. and outsourcing provider UST Global Inc. will help the startup make its proposition even more attractive to organizations struggling to contain insider threats.

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