* Forget fighting the malware, protect online transactions with Rapport from Trusteer
With malware infecting nearly 50% of all PCs, the thought of conducting sensitive transactions over the Web is frightening. Even antivirus and antispyware vendors say it’s impossible to prevent attacks from phishing, pharming, man-in-the-middle, keystroke logging, and other means. Going online to pay bills or make a purchase means a person could be giving away his user ID, password or account information without even knowing it. Now, Trusteer offers a unique solution to protect transactions between the desktop and a specific Web site. ING Direct is one of the first banks to make the solution available to its customers.
Antivirus (Compare antivirus products) vendors and Internet security consultants around the world are reporting a staggering increase in new malicious code in circulation in just the past year. Russia-based Kaspersky Labs believes there will be a ten-fold increase in malware by the end of 2008. F-Secure is more conservative in its estimate, with “only” a doubling of the instances of malicious code in the wild. TrendLabs, Symantec, the IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force – all of them warn that malware is becoming more prevalent as well as much more sophisticated.
Internet security company Prevx estimates nearly 50% of all PCs are infected by malware today. Perhaps your PC is infected, and you don’t even know it. Maybe there’s a keystroke logger capturing everything you type and sending it to criminals half-way around the world right now. Still feel like going online to check your bank account balance and pay some bills? I sure don’t.
Security vendor Trusteer has studied this problem and come up with a unique solution to protect transactions between the desktop and a specific Web site. Forget fighting the malware; Trusteer assumes it’s already on the PC and instead creates a secure channel to transmit login credentials and transactions between the PC and select protected Web sites. In effect, the credentials and transactions are completely hidden from any malware or virus that exists on the user’s desktop.
The name of the product is Rapport. It establishes three protection layers on the desktop, and as a result, malware can’t read credentials and can’t read or interfere with the communication as it doesn’t even see the communication.
The API blocking layer controls operating system API calls that malware can use to access information or tamper with the session. For example, when the user is connected to a protected Web site, malware can’t use operating system APIs to read keystrokes or capture the screen. It can’t access the browser to read or write data. It can’t use commands to inject or alter transactions, and it can’t capture session cookies stored by the browser.
The data encryption layer is the second line of defense. If an attacker manages to bypass the API blocking layer, then the data encryption layer keeps the information secure. It does so by encrypting sensitive information that travels between the user and the browser. Keystrokes are encrypted as soon as they are generated by the keyboard driver all the way to the browser. Furthermore, the temporary information that the browser keeps is encrypted as well and all the information that travels from the browser is encrypted until it is being transmitted over SSL to the Web site.
Lastly, the delivery confirmation layer ensures that information submitted by the user reaches the intended Web site and not a fraudulent one. This is done by validating the Web site’s IP address through a secure DNS server operated by Trusteer. Should a browser connect to a wrong IP address, Rapport immediately diverts the traffic to the correct IP address. Rapport also validates the SSL certificate and ensures that it really belongs to the Web site even if the attacker managed to tamper with the browser’s certificate store.
There are two components to Rapport:
Rapport Desktop is a 400K executable file that consumers download and install on their PC. Rapport Desktop is the actual component that protects the consumer, preventing attacks using the three protection layers.
Rapport Management Application (RMA) is a centralized management application that provides software and configuration updates to all the instances of Rapport Desktop. RMA is managed by Trusteer in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
Although the software is installed on end users’ PCs, Trusteer’s customers are the companies that have a vested interest in providing a secure channel between their own Web-based applications (i.e., a “protected Web site”) and the consumers’ (or internal users’) computers; for example a bank, a healthcare provider, or a stock broker. These companies license the Trusteer software and make the Rapport Desktop software available to their customers via download. However, there is nothing for these companies to install or operate; all of the software is on the end users’ PCs and on the Trusteer central server.
ING Direct is among Trusteer’s first companies making the solution available to all its customers. ING Direct is the nation’s largest “direct” bank – meaning there are no local branches, and most transactions are done via the Internet. ING is encouraging all its customers to download and install Rapport Desktop for free. When the software is installed, the customer is assured of a secure connection between their PC and the ING Web site.
Rob Weaver is head of IT security for ING Direct. He thinks American consumers are becoming more sensitive to Internet security issues, so the business driver for ING Direct to buy Rapport was primarily “negative impact avoidance.” In other words, ING could potentially have lost customers if they ever felt their transactions were at risk, but Rapport provides another layer of security to keep customers safe, secure and confident.
Rapport also can be used to protect corporate Web-based applications. For example, a company that uses SaaS software such as NetSuite could install Rapport on its end users’ PCs to protect all transactions between the company’s computers and the NetSuite applications.
Trusteer prices the Rapport software per user, per year. The average price per user is about $1, but volume discounts are available. As a consumer who uses online banking services, I’d gladly pay a buck a year to know my transactions are protected. Wouldn’t you?
