Some financial services companies are offering software to protect their customers against online fraud.
Several high-profile data thefts have prompted complaints from customers and industry observers that financial services companies are not doing enough to protect information. Bankers have said that individuals must also take steps to secure their home computers, and some companies are providing the tools to help them do so.
The Atlanta credit rating agency Equifax Inc. encourages visitors to its Web site to download a browser toolbar that can issue a warning if someone tries to visit a fraudulent banking site.
Vince Corica, Equifax's group executive for personal solutions, said its strategy for helping customers protect themselves against fraud "begins with education and then segues to tools."
The program attaches to a consumer's Web browser and provides warnings to consumers who try to access a site that has been confirmed as a fake, or sites that are not confirmed as impostors but behave like them.
In addition to protecting customers, Equifax said, the toolbar has helped persuade visitors to the site to become customers.
The toolbar was developed by the Atlanta Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. "We are working on similar relationships with a great number of other companies," including banks, said Scott Mecredy, Earthlink's senior product manager for protection software.
The Omaha online brokerage Ameritrade Holding Corp. offers to scan its customers' computers for viruses any time they visit its Web site.
J.T. Keating, the vice president of marketing for WholeSecurity Inc., the Austin company that makes Ameritrade's scanning software, said that the scans it has performed in the past year have been unsettling.
At Ameritrade, "upwards of 10% of the PCs have had something on it that we've detected," he said, and "the vast majority of those 10% were truly malicious" items that could have stolen account information if they had not been disabled.
The software can disable a virus by quarantining it from the rest of a customer's system - "basically, knock it on the head," he said.
WholeSecurity's software scans only active applications on a computer, so it is faster than standard anti-virus programs that scan an entire machine for signs of known viruses, including those that may be dormant, WholeSecurity said.
In its scans, the software has also detected parental monitoring software, which some criminals use instead of actual viruses. Even when the monitoring tools - which record online activity, including keystrokes - are legitimately installed by parents, "do you really want them running when you have an online banking session?" Mr. Keating said.
CollectiveTrust Solutions Inc., a San Francisco security vendor, has a product whose concept is similar to the Earthlink toolbar. The product, ScamAlarm, attaches itself to Web browsers to block users from visiting fake sites.
Blake Hayward, CollectiveTrust's chief executive, said that banks have historically expected consumers to protect themselves against viruses and scams on their own. "It's been the consumer's issue, because it's been the consumer's computer," he said. However, "financial institutions are really starting to look at it differently."
Avivah Litan, a vice president and research director at the Stamford, Conn., market research company Gartner Inc., said most banks "are really on a consumer-education frenzy … [but] our research shows that it's had a very marginal impact."
Providing software to consumers is one way to achieve better results, but "there's more effective methods that banks can use to achieve the same goal on the back end," such as requiring stronger authentication for high-risk online transactions, she said.
