What’s the difference between identity theft and identity fraud? In the first case, identifiers such as your credit card information and Social Security number are stolen. In the latter case, they are being misused by the bad guys. If you could prevent the first instance, you wouldn’t have to worry much about online fraud.
That’s the rationale behind a new service from Authentium called SafeCentral. It marries a secure desktop with a secure Web browser, and adds secure portals to banking, e-commerce and other popular online destinations, preventing attackers from being able to compromise personal information that could be used for fraud.
Authentium’s vice president of marketing, Corey O’Donnell, told us that the two predominant approaches to Web-commerce security were important, but flawed. Tools such as antivirus or anti-spyware software, which try to keep off or cleanse hacker tools from computers, are reactive, while the ever-more-sophisticated (and complicated) authentication measures in place at e-commerce sites can be subverted.
“If someone is able to watch you long enough, meaning they’ve already installed a piece of spyware, or they’ve inserted a man-in-the-middle attack, and they’re at the network level watching everything that you do, it really won’t take them that long to gather enough information to become you,” O’Donnell said. “These are great layers in preventing fraud, but they don’t really prevent theft.”
Locking Down Desktops and Browsers
SafeCentral’s approach begins by securing desktops with proprietary technology that “sits as a traffic cop in between all Windows calls,” O’Donnell said. It allows “only the stuff that we know, that we trust, to be part of a session, and nothing else.” So suspicious behavior — a command to capture keystrokes, for example — will be blocked.
The next element is the SafeCentral browser, which performs transactions and visits sites only where security is paramount; it is…