Imprivata Buys Verosint for Real-Time Identity Risk Spotting

Imprivata purchased an identity threat detection and response startup led by Ping Identity’s former chief product officer to thwart efforts by cybercriminals to impersonate legitimate users.

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The Boston-area healthcare access management provider said its acquisition of Austin-area Verosint will address the need for risk-based identity and access management amid increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats, said CEO Fran Rosch. He said Verosint’s 150 real-time risk signals will be integrated into Imprivata’s access management and PAM tools to provide smarter, real-time authentication decisions.

“By bringing ITDR and SSO together, we can have real-time interdiction and prevent problems from ever even happening,” Rosch said. “So in this case, if the user is trying to access and trying to single sign on to those applications, our ITDR now can identify that risk in real time and take action in real time. We don’t think these should be two different solutions. We think they have to be integrated into one.”

The company, founded in 2021, employs 16 people, emerged from stealth in June 2022 with $8 million in seed funding from Bill Wood Ventures and Silverton Partners, and rebranded in March 2023 from 443ID to Verosint. The company has been led since its inception by Steve Shoaff, who established UnboundID, sold it to Ping Identity in 2016 and was then Ping’s chief product officer for several years (see: SailPoint Buys Imprivata IGA Assets to Boost Healthcare).

How Risk-Based Access Can Keep Organizations Safe

The rise of credential theft, phishing and artificial intelligence-generated social engineering exposed gaps in traditional access models, and building a risk-based approach to identity in-house would have taken time. Verosint ensures speed-to-market for Imprivata by providing a mature and advanced risk engine, capable of analyzing more than 150 behavioral and contextual signals per access attempt, Rosch said.

“Imprivata had such a long history of the badge tap and primarily in healthcare, to make that single sign-on and device access really, really simple,” Rosch told Information Security Media Group. “But there’s a lot of innovation and a lot of change happening in the world of access management, so there is really a need to have a risk-based approach.”

Access traditionally was based on static identifiers such as passwords, tokens and predetermined role, but as AI-powered impersonation tactics have advanced, Rosch said organizations need a dynamic and adaptive approach. Instead of generating alerts for review hours later, Rosch said Verosint can analyze user behavior on the spot, triggering actions including stepped-up authentication or immediate blocks.

“The main benefit of having ITDR integrated in with SSO is the real-time nature of decision making,” Rosch said. “In a lot of cases, ITDR is something that gets done and a ticket gets generated, and an hour or a day later, somebody goes and investigates. ‘Hey, this looks like this identity was a little funky. Let’s see whether that was an error, a mistake, or an illegitimate user.'”

Rosch said current systems apply the same authentication path to all users, often requiring two-factor authentication or biometrics regardless of the risk involved. If the system has high confidence that the user is legitimate going forward, it can eliminate the need for additional prompts or MFA challenges. On the flip side, if anomalies are detected, the system can immediately escalate the verification process.

“By leveraging this ITDR to look at your signals of behavior, we’re going to develop a confidence score,” Rosch said. “And if we get a very high confidence score that you are who you say you are, we can remove the need to do maybe a 2FA, or we can let you use a BYOD. We can give you more flexibility as a user, removing that friction.”

Why Supply Chain Risk Is So Vexing for Identity Providers

Many organizations leave a gap when it comes to controls on contractors, service providers, or vendors, Rosch said, with external users often reusing shared passwords and using unverified devices to access sensitive systems. By integrating Verosint’s ITDR, Imprivata can now analyze third-party behavior in real time and spot anomalies such as credential reuse or access attempts from unexpected geographies.

“This supply chain risk is a real problem because it’s difficult for us to umbrella our security policies over those third parties,” Rosch said. “With Verosint ITDR, we can make that even smarter by adding that risk signaling as another way to ensure we know the vendor is who they say they are, and we can weed out anomalous behavior through adding the Verosint ITDR to what we already do with our VPAM solution.”

By the end of 2025, the company plans to demonstrate functional integration of Verosint’s risk engine into both of Imprivata’s platform, with Verosint’s developers participating in system buildouts. In the first half of 2026, Imprivata will focus on quality assurance, training support teams, preparing go-to-market materials and ensuring robust performance of Verosint’s risk engine in enterprise environments.

“By the end of this year, we want to integrate this risk-based approach into our flagship enterprise access management product,” Rosch said. “We also want to integrate it into our privileged access security and our vendor privileged access security by the end of the year.”

The success of the Verosint deal will be measured by the adoption of the advanced and passwordless access module across Imprivata’s customer base, which includes facial biometrics, FIDO authentication, VRN replacement features and real-time ITDR scoring. Imprivata will track how many existing customers choose to add APA to their contracts as the main performance metric for the Verosint deal, Rosch said.

“Our metrics are on attach rate,” Rosch said. “We’ll be in the single digit attach rate right for the first year or two, but ultimately, we’d love to see all of our 4,500 customers leveraging the APA and the ITDR capability we’re acquiring from Verosint.”