IBM on Thursday announced it was buying Trusteer, an Internetsecurity specialist with offices in Boston and Israel and wellknown in the credit union space.

The computer services giant said it would be creating a newcyber security software lab in Israel with more than 200researchers and developers from Trusteer and IBM. Their focus, IBMsaid, would be on mobile security, cyber threats, malware, fraudand other financial crimes.

Along with seven of the top 10 U.S. banks and nine of the top 10U.K. banks, the company said, Trusteer software is used to secureaccounts by creditunions individually and through online banking vendors.

IBM said it has now acquired a dozen security companies inrecent years. Its security services monitor 15 billion securityevents a day for nearly 4,000 clients globally, the companysaid.

“Trusteer's expertise and superior technology in enterpriseendpoint defense and advanced malware prevention will help ourclients across all industries address the constantly evolvingthreats they are facing,” said Brendan Hannigan, general manager,Security Systems Division, IBM.

“Together with IBM's capabilities in advanced threat detection,analysis and remediation, we will now be able to offer our clientsseveral additional layers of defense against sophisticatedattackers,” Hannigan said in the announcement from IBM in Armonk,N.Y.

Trusteer was founded in 2006. Terms for its sale to IBM were notannounced.

This is at least the second major sale of an Internet securityfirm for some of the Trusteer executives, including Amit Klein, theTrusteer CTO who had been chief scientist at New York-basedCyota Inc. when it was acquired by RSASecurity in 2005, which was sold not long after, in 2006, tostorage giant EMC Corp. The company also traces its roots to PassMark, another Internet security pioneer.

Another major player in the online security business for creditunions, SecureWorks in Atlanta, was sold to computer giant Dell in2011.