Third Brigade's security system is being used by the Harvard Medical School to protect its customer payment data from hackers.

The Ottawa-based company said the school had deployed Third Brigade's Deep Security host intrustion detection and prevention system to help protect its web applications and servers from targeted attacks against cardholder data.

The system will also allow the medical school to meet data security standards set out by the Payment Card Industry (PCI).

Third Brigade's solution will provide such functions as enabling firewall network segmentation to reduce the scope of the PCI audit, 'virtual patching' as a compensating control to comply with requirements for vendor security patches to be applied within one month of release, and detecting and preventing attacks that target cardholder data and alerting staff the moment an attack has been attempted.