Guidance Software Teams with Caltech Data Scientists to Research How to Thwart Hackers

Guidance Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: GUID), maker of EnCase®, software for digital investigations and endpoint data security, today announced it has funded a program at Caltech to support data security research using advanced anomaly science.

Discoveries will be published and used by Caltech and Guidance Software to enhance data breach detection and incident response capabilities.

“Hackers are relentless. Breaches of major corporate or government data centers are on the rise to the tune of billions of dollars in losses per year,” said Michael Harris, Chief Marketing Officer of Guidance Software. “Our industry is facing a massive labor shortage of cybersecurity specialists. To address this shortfall, we are working with data scientists at Caltech, one of the most respected research universities in the world, to use anomaly detection, complex event processing, and machine learning to help us thwart these breaches and reduce the damage to taxpayers and corporate profits.”

The joint program will be run out of Caltech’s new Center for Data-driven Discovery, in collaboration with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The Center was established for the advancement of data-intensive, computationally enabled science and technology. This research will be conducted under the direction of principal scientist Julian Bunn and professor emeritus Mani Chandy, who have developed algorithms and processes to detect anomalous patterns in data sets used in critical areas such as earthquake prediction and now in the detection of advanced malware and their polymorphic variants.

Timely and effective breach detection of modern threats requires a scientific approach based on machine learning and statistical models. The most common ways to deal with data security issues is through the use of signatures, blacklists or shared threat intelligence. These traditional approaches leave organizations open to the risk of unknown or zero-day malware, which can only be found by focusing on detection of anomalous or atypical behavior that may indicate unauthorized access to sensitive data.

“We are thrilled to be working with Guidance Software on such an important initiative,” said Karina Edmonds, Executive Director for Corporate Sponsorships at Caltech. “Our institute is focused on applying science to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research. This work to solve for breach detection and malware discovery is consistent with our mission.”

About California Institute of Technology

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a world-renowned science and engineering research and education institution, where extraordinary faculty and students seek answers to complex questions, discover new knowledge, lead innovation, and transform our future. Caltech’s 124-acre campus is located in Pasadena, California. Visit: http://www.caltech.edu/

About Center for Data-driven Discovery

The central focus of CD3 is methodologies for handling and analysis of large and complex data sets, in facilitating the data-to-discovery process. It is about applications of data-driven computing in various scientific domains, such as biology, physics, astronomy, geophysics, etc. CD3 also serves as a catalyst for new collaborations and projects between different scientific disciplines, and between the campus and JPL. We are especially interested in the sharing and transfer of methodologies, where the solutions from one field can be reapplied in another one.

For more information about CD3, visit: http://cd3.caltech.edu/index.html

About Guidance Software

Guidance Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: GUID), the maker of the EnCase technology platform, is the gold standard in digital investigations and endpoint data security, helping organizations around the world lower business risk by providing the most complete visibility to data everywhere it’s stored—on the endpoint, across servers, and into the cloud. Guidance Software solutions are built for integration within a rich technology ecosystem, including Dropbox, HP, Cisco, Box, and Blue Coat Systems. Recognized as the market leader in endpoint detection and response by Gartner, the company’s EnCase platform has been deployed on an estimated 25 million endpoints and is used with confidence by more than 70 of the Fortune 100 and hundreds of government agencies around the world.