Member Article

Paddy Power Betfair boosts security with Balabit

Market-leading online betting provider selects advanced user monitoring solution to protect customer’s data and ensure regulatory compliance

Leading online gambling provider, Paddy Power Betfair Plc, has announced that it has deployed Balabit’s privileged user monitoring solution Shell Control Box (SCB) to monitor privileged access to production systems and enhance the security and flexibility of its product development processes. As a fast growing operator, managing millions of sensitive financial transactions, Paddy Power Betfair required a cost-effective solution, which could create a secure audit trail of what has happened during product development and that supports compliance with regulatory bodies. The Balabit solution provides comprehensive session recording to provide full assurance that all developers’ activities are monitored, accountable and traceable.

With a market-leading, global presence, Paddy Power Betfair is focused on continually improving its IT processes to deliver product improvements at a faster pace, through the use of development concepts, such as Agile, DevOps or Continuous Delivery. It must also demonstrate strict IT controls to comply with PCI DSS, ISO 27001, gaming and gambling regulations. In order to support these processes, Paddy Power Betfair selected Balabit’s session recording solution to monitor its developers and to protect the systems they support. The solution was originally deployed with Betfair in 2015 and, following its recent merger with Paddy Power, there’s an ongoing plan to extend the implementation across the entire organisation.

The Balabit solution audits access to its Linux servers as well as to some Windows systems. Users are able to connect to the production servers only through SCB and, after they are granted access to the server, SCB monitors and records all their activities in a tamper-proof way. The solution operates host-independently and transparently; therefore, implementation does not interfere with daily operations.

The solution was deployed by Abilott, a leading provider of governance, risk and compliance solutions, a long time Balabit partner in the UK. Virtual SCB appliances have been deployed in the operator’s data centres.

Vasile Dorca, Head of Security Compliance and Assurance at Paddy Power Betfair comments: “We arereally impressed with the quality and features available within Shell Control Box; it fulfilled all the important criteria we had in terms of a fast implementation, easy configuration, reliable logging and transparency for users.”

Zoltán Györkő, CEO of Balabit comments, “We’re delighted that Paddy Power Betfair has selected Balabit’s Shell Control Box to support its product development processes. We’re committed to delivering solutions which provide a real return on investment and meet today’s increasingly compliance-driven security requirements. Shell Control Box brings strong levels of security along with improved usability and flexibility so that organisations have the assurances that privileged user activity is fully audited, to fully protect their own customer’s data.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Balabit .