Canberra's IT industry has been consolidated following the acquisition of banking security company Fraudsight by business rules management vendor RuleBurst for an undisclosed amount.

The deal will combine an impressive customer base from RuleBurst, including the Department of Defence, the Department of Veterans' Affairs, Centrelink, the Department of Finance and Administration, the Queensland Department of Housing, and the NSW Premier's Department, with Fraudsight's customers which includes the Commonwealth Bank and two of the other big four banks.

The acquisition will provide the companies with an opportunity to leverage each other's customers.

In a statement from RuleBurst, the company said: "the deal will see FraudSight's staff, products and services fully integrated into RuleBurst as part of a new financial crime division".

Former FraudSight CEO and now RuleBurst financial crime solutions director Peter O'Hanlon confirmed the deal will see Fraudsight offering the RuleBurst management tool to its clients.

"Integrating FraudSight's quantitative, artificial intelligence technology with RuleBurst's qualitative, natural language platform will enable RuleBurst's corporate and public sector customers to ensure compliance with both known rules and those that cannot be expressed," O'Hanlon said.

Fraudsight's security tool uses an integrated engine of networks and rule sets to qualify post-transaction suspicious behaviour worthy of additional validation which it feeds into a Web based workflow system for audit and tracking by operators.

IBRS security analyst James Turner said while the tool would be effective in identifying suspicious completed transactions, proper online security requires preventive security.

"These sorts of tools flag transactions that do not match normal user behaviour, or have a conflict in time or geography such as a transaction beginning in Australia and ending up in Nigeria, but they fail to stop the transaction becoming compromised in the first place," Turner said.

He said most banks employ additional security such as twin-factor authentication, but said the best prevention is user desktop security.

RuleBurts CTO Davin Fifield said the company's management tool allows non-technical people to write comprehensive business rule sets in complex environments involving elements such as legal and financial legislation and policy.

"For example, a person who understands social security legislation can write business rules capable of automatically determining a citizen's entitlement to a benefit," Fifield said.

FraudSight detected more than $100 million worth of fraud over the last two years by applying data analytics and neural networking to financial crimes such as online banking fraud and money laundering.

Fifield said the company's half-yearly revenue grew by more than three times to $8 million during its 2004 when it secured the United Kingdom's HM Revenue & Customs office for $4.5 million.