Targeted at web browser and anti-virus providers, Internet service providers and other companies that offer desktop services, the new technology utilizes patented, automated spidering capabilities to build a whitelist. This ground-zero approach automates the process of website authentication, effectively eliminating active consumer involvement and taking the burden off of e-commerce sites and financial institutions to verify their websites to consumers.

"Financial institutions have no control of the consumer desktop, compelling many banks to authenticate their websites to their customers," said George Tubin, Senior Analyst, TowerGroup, the world's leading research and consulting firm focused on the global financial services industry. "Moving website authentication to the end user's desktop for all ecommerce and Internet browsing activity will allow financial institutions to focus on customer authentication and create a consistent web browsing experience for their customers."

Leveraging Digital Resolve's patented data mining capabilities, which were developed in 1999 as the core building component of the company's patented IP Intelligence technology, Trusted Server Technology crawls the Internet 24 x 7, verifying the authenticity of financial services and e-commerce websites to create an "ultimate whitelist" that can be used in web browsers and other desktop applications to safeguard consumers against rogue websites. Existing whitelists simply match what a user types to a literal static list of domain names, which fails to protect against a poisoned host file, DNS cache poisoning, or pharming.

"We had two main goals in mind when creating our Trusted Server Technology: to remove the onus from financial institutions to provide website authentication for their customers, and to take current, ineffective methods such as the use of static whitelists and blacklists and consumer-involved image selection to a whole new level," said Dennis Maicon, executive vice president of financial services solutions, Digital Resolve. "We have always believed that website authentication should take place at the desktop and that consumers should not have to jump through hoops to safely navigate the Internet."

When consumers visit banking or e-commerce websites, the whitelist created by Digital Resolve's Trusted Server Technology provides information about the authenticity of a website in real time to its clients, who can use recognizable safe or unsafe symbols such as a thumbs up or thumbs down to let consumers know whether or not to proceed on a given website. This ever-evolving whitelist, which is constantly monitored and updated to accommodate changes to websites, simplifies the authentication process for both consumers and the websites that serve them, and is designed to protect consumers against phishing, pharming, Man-in-the-Middle and other attacks that direct web surfers to socially engineered websites designed to steal personal information that is used by online criminals to commit identity fraud.

360-Degree Protection

Trusted Server Technology joins Digital Resolve's comprehensive online fraud and identity theft prevention solutions, which are designed to protect consumers at every online touchpoint. Other offerings from Digital Resolve include:

Fraud Analyst

• A proven risk-based authentication solution that detects and acts upon suspicious activity in real time
• Protects online banking customers throughout the customer lifecycle from new account opening and enrollment to login authentication to high-risk transaction analysis
• Currently deployed protecting millions of accounts and applications

E-Scam

• A phishing prevention solution that stops phishing emails before they reach the consumer desktop
• Currently in deployment with Earthlink, the nation's second largest ISP