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Mountain Central Association of REALTORS® Utilizes AdmitOne Security Scout AdmitOne Security Scout Enables Trusted Members to Benefit from New Subscription Policies Seattle—February 10, 2009— AdmitOne Security, the leading innovator of solutions for identity assurance and analytics, announced that the Mountain Central Association of REALTORS® (MCAR) is utilizing Scout to monitor use of their multiple listing service (MLS). Scout provides MCAR with an ability to transparently monitor system access and identify usage violations.
Every day, thousands of MLS accounts are compromised by account sharing: the deliberate sharing of account credentials to fraudulently enable more people to use an MLS than are authorized to do so. In response, some MLS organizations have implemented strong authentication solutions to protect their services from fraud. These authentication solutions have focused more on prevention than enablement which means that they are not only expensive but intrusive as well. Combined with the ease of sharing tokens, secret-questions, or certificates, the traditional authentication approaches do not fully protect an MLS, but do create a significant inconvenience for trusted members.
MCAR wanted to extend the availability of their MLS but was struggling to find a good solution to account sharing that ensured trusted users would not be inconvenienced.
MCAR opted to protect its service with a “one-join, all-join” policy for REALTORS®. The “one-join, all-join” policy means that if one agent in an office joins, all licensed agents in that office must also join the MLS. While the policy protected the MLS from abuse, it also limited its availability to specialized REALTORS® whose office mates did not want to join. Consequently, MCAR still needed a way to detect account sharing.
“For several years, MCAR had been searching for a solution to account sharing that balanced the needs of the MLS with delivering a great member experience,” said Ray Moore, past president of MCAR. “Because our policy was holding the MCAR’s business back, we more than ever needed a solution designed to detect account sharing without the expense and intrusiveness of traditional strong authentication.”
In October of 2008, MCAR began to utilize an on-demand solution called AdmitOne Security Scout to monitor access to the MLS portal. Scout monitors access to the MLS portal and generates alerts regarding usage violations associated with account sharing. The Scout monitoring solution is transparent to members and provides MCAR the information they need to make remediation and policy decisions for their MLS. For the first time, MCAR could see in detail which accounts were being shared and could make proactive decisions to resolve issues.
“Originally designed to stop account takeover, traditional authentication solutions are easily circumvented by people who are in collusion to share an account,” said Matthew Shanahan, SVP marketing and strategy at AdmitOne Security. “AdmitOne Security Scout is the only solution specifically designed to detect and profile account sharing even if people share the same computer. Because Scout is transparent to users, purpose-built, and delivered on-demand, it delivers a dramatically higher ROI than any other approach.”
There is a growing consensus that effective service protection doesn't need to slow the pace of an MLS or its members. AdmitOne Security Scout is an on-demand solution that works without requiring members to carry additional hardware or remember additional information, and Scout causes no disruption to members. As a hosted solution, AdmitOne Security Scout requires no on-premise hardware or software for an MLS. After monitoring begins, Scout immediately tracks member access and begins detection of any account sharing within the subscriber base. AdmitOne Security Scout delivers rich graphical reporting capabilities to allow managers to monitor and act on anomalies, which may indicate potentially fraudulent activity. For those MLS organizations looking to add targeted strong authentication, AdmitOne provides zero-footprint enforcement of security policies to control account access.
“As a smaller MLS, a critical element of our decision-making was ROI and affordability,” said Moore. “Scout was extremely attractive in comparison to other solutions.”
About AdmitOne Security
AdmitOne Security (www.admitonesecurity.com), located in Issaquah, Washington, is a venture-backed software company providing hosted and on-premise identity assurance and analytics solutions with the mission to change the economics of identity assurance. AdmitOne is currently delivering authentication and fraud detections solutions for organizations in a variety of industries, including: financial, SaaS providers, government, healthcare, manufacturing, legal and automotive. To learn more, visit www.admitonesecurity.com or call (425) 649-1100.
AdmitOne Security® is a registered trademark of AdmitOne Security, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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