TrustDefender taking trusty transaction tech to top tiers

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 21 March 2010 23:58

Business IT - Security

Empowered by unique technology and a buoyed by a stunning $16m investment in Australia, despite the global financial crisis, TrustDefender is taking its technology to the world’s top tier financial instutitions and expects strong security success.

Following an AUD $16M investment by Nexbis Ltd for 50.08% of Australian based company TrustDefender, the transactional trust titan has embarked upon a renewed strategic initiative to bring its “revolutionary real-time risk based online transaction security solutions” to a market which is under increasingly sophisticated waves of crimeware attack.

The investment is one of the largest in the Australian tech space for several years and has arrived in the wake of the global financial crisis, showing that Australian technology can still take on the world’s top security companies and have massive appeal to the world’s banks, big and small.

TrustDefender says that the funding will be used to expand sales, marketing and delivery operations in Europe and North America, where cybercrime is exponentially growing, and to execute a growing number of projects in business, Governments, and Tier 1 and Tier 2 financial institutions, including banks.

Ted Egan, CEO of TrustDefender notes that, while the $16m investment is large by Australian standards, it's small by world standards, and that "The size of the growing sophistication in online crime development means we will need every bit to keep up with market demand", adding that: “According to the FBI, online fraud has increased over 100% between 2008 and 2009 (PDF link) in the USA alone. Our goal is to drive increased confidence in online transactions, protect people’s identities and reduce the cost of doing business online”.

Egan points to a recent report by Gartner which illustrates the risks of today’s malicious software and warns how hackers are defeating tough authentication, highlighting a crucial point from the Gartner report which states that “Fraudsters have been raiding user bank accounts that seemingly were protected by strong two-factor authentication, but any sensitive Web application is similarly vulnerable”, adding that TrustDefender’s technology fills this malware/crimeware security gap – and has done so for several years.

It's also interesting to note that online crime is one of the few areas of business that actually grew substantially during the global financial crisis, creating a booming illegitimate business, putting the onus on businesses, banks and Government to dramatically improve their security to actually defeat the latest malware, presenting TrustDefender with an incredible opportunity to lead its customers out of the perfect malware storm they have all been facing.

TrustDefender highlights the “unique benefits” of its technology, noting that it offers:

- A revolutionary new approach to endpoint security through ‘memory forensics’
- Real-time risk based technology [that] wraps security around the existing authentication, transaction and traditional anti-virus/fraud detection security solutions at both the consumer and back end
- An ability to deal with any deficiency on the server side and the ability to proactively secure users, regardless of the already existent malicious software on an end-user’s machine
- Simultaneously addresses the missing points of real-time security health status reported to the end-user and the financial institution
- Independence from any web browsers where ‘man-in-the middle’ attacks often occur due to weaknesses in the browser technology

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