The eCommerce Challenge
In today's networked world, millions of people worldwide are turning to eCommerce to streamline and simplify their lives. But nearly as many people are choosing not to conduct transactions over the web, and seemingly for good reason. A joint Javelin Strategy & Better Business Bureau “Identity Fraud Survey” study reports 8.9M victims of online fraud and identity theft in the US for 2006, leading to losses of $56.6 Billion. To regain customer confidence, online retailers and credit card companies have turned to anti-fraud guarantees. This approach is unsustainable, however, because it does not stop financial losses from occurring and serves to further erode consumer confidence. The net result is an escalation in losses due to fraud and a lost opportunity for Commerce companies to expand their customer base and derive additional revenues.
Threats Run Rampant
In spite of all the best efforts to prevent and eradicate threats to secure banking transactions, online companies and their customers are losing the battle due to a number of factors:
- As malware grows more sophisticated, there has been a marked drop in the effectiveness of the existing prevention techniques (anti-virus, firewall, host intrusion prevention and other products).
- Today’s environment requires too many pieces of prevention software and too much diligence on the part of end users to be effective at stemming the tide.
- Due to the complexity and richness of today’s computing platforms, there exist too many vulnerabilities to ever hope to create a bullet-proof platform.
- Exploitation of these vulnerabilities has created a plethora of tools (e.g., rootkits, keyloggers, phishing techniques, etc.) for hackers to perpetrate an increasingly broad range of attacks (e.g., using stolen user credentials to execute “pump and dump” schemes in online brokerage, fraudulent wire transfers in online banking, fraudulent eCommerce websites, etc.)
Traditional Safeguards Fail, Breeding Fear
Traditional approaches to safeguard against online banking threats like viruses, spyware and other malware rely on a fundamentally flawed methodology. By all accounts, signature based approaches, including anti-virus and anti-spyware toolkits, have abysmal success rates stopping malware and providing secure online transactions. Leading anti-virus vendor Trend Micro agrees, whose CEO Eva Chen says "the anti-virus industry sucks. If you have 5.5 million new viruses out there how can you claim this industry is doing the right job?"
The net result is that the majority of systems are already compromised or soon will be. Research done by leading analysts estimate that 40-60% of all consumer PCs are compromised with some type of malware. Consumers are aware of this threat, but feel powerless to stop it.
How do businesses allay public fears about eCommerce and simultaneously manage the associated financial risk? How can businesses extend their corporate security environment to their consumers? How can they regain the trust and credibility with their customers that they have lost?
SiteTrust -- Secure eCommerce in an Insecure World
The answer is SiteTrust, and it begins with understanding that doing business online safely is not a matter of cleaning consumer machines. It is rather about bypassing known compromise points so that secure transactions take place whether a machine has been compromised or not.
Unlike traditional security solutions, SiteTrust provides fingertip to server security by first assuming that the end user machine has already been compromised. It is through this revolutionary approach that SiteTrust was able to demonstrate 100% effectiveness at stopping known malware by two independent laboratory evaluations. For banks looking to provide superior secure customer experience, and capture more market share and competitive advantage, SiteTrust is the only solution.