The Secure Electronic Transaction Challenge
In today's technology driven world, online transactions are fast becoming the primary means by which people carry out their professional and personal transactions. From online trading and banking, to bill paying, shopping and services, the world’s leading corporations have been leveraging online transactions to reduce operating costs, increase their sales, and attract new customers.
Today, there is a clear threat to this online marketplace. It is well organized, well funded and realizing substantial profits by stealing customer credentials or hijacking online transactions to commit fraud. Anti-fraud guarantees from corporations doing business online have provided a stopgap measure to retain customers, however the losses are becoming unsustainable and wind up funding crime syndicates, which only accelerates and compounds the problem.
Traditional Approaches Continue to Fail
The existing anti-fraud measures are unsustainable due to two key issues, both stemming from the fact that these measures are reactive by nature:
- They do little to restore customer trust after an incident.
- They do not stop financial losses, leading to further funding and more resources for the bad guys.
The result, despite the best efforts to prevent and eradicate malware, is that online companies and their customers are losing the anti-fraud war. The reasons:
- 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).
- Existing disparate security solutions create too much complexity and required diligence for and on the part of end users to be effective.
- The existing vulnerabilities in today’s rich computing platforms can never be reversed due to cost and complexity.
Exploitation of system level vulnerabilities has led to the creation of a plethora of attack tools (rootkits, keyloggers, phishing techniques, etc.) enabling hackers to perpetrate online transactions with an increasingly broad range of attacks including; using stolen user credentials to execute “pump and dump” schemes, fraudulent wire transfers and fraudulent eCommerce websites.
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. The losses due to malware are staggering – E*Trade, for example, reported $31.2M in losses for 2006.
How do businesses address this financial risk and re-capture the many advantages that online transactions offer? How can businesses extend their corporate security environment to their consumers?
SiteTrust -- Secure Transactions in an Insecure World
The answer is SiteTrust, the leading solution for securing online banking, brokerage and eCommerce transactions. SiteTrust is the next generation in fraud prevention solutions that protects the integrity of the business or financial transaction and prevents millions of dollars in annual losses due to online fraud.
It effectively extends your corporate security perimeter out to partner and customer machines during online transactions so that each transaction is protected from initial authentication to completion as if it were occurring inside your corporate domain – from fingertip to server. SiteTrust redefines the fraud and malware problem by taking a new an innovative approach to protecting both the business and the consumer, rebuilding the trust in online financial and ecommerce business. SiteTrust’s new approach includes:
- The presumption that a PC is already infected
- A focus on securing a transaction rather than the whole machine
- A flexible, risk based approach for both deployment and usage to meet the needs of consumers
- The ability to extend the corporate security perimeter to consumer computers during transactions.