Five technology vendors have formed a marketing alliance to promote their fraud protection offerings, and two of them plan to integrate their products.
The Anti-Fraud Alliance, whose formation was announced last week, hopes to educate banks about the growing threat posed by identity theft and phishing. The vendors — Symantec Corp., NameProtect Inc., Internet Identity, Corillian Corp., and PassMark Security Inc. — offer different products and services to block Internet con artists from launching attacks, protect users from the scams, or catch the criminals afterward.
The vendors say that when used together, their offerings can protect banks at every stage of an online swindle.
Corillian, of Hillsboro, Ore., also said it is integrating PassMark’s authentication software into its Voyager online banking products. The integrated software will be available early next year.
Jim Maloney, Corillian’s chief security executive, said PassMark’s software is especially effective against phishing, which lures customers to fake online banking sites, where they can be tricked into revealing their passwords and account details. The product makes a bank site harder to duplicate. The bank’s customers can select a image, or even provide one of their own, which the bank later displays during the log-on process to prove the site’s authenticity.
Mr. Maloney said that Corillian would make PassMark’s software available for an extra fee on all Voyager products, and that banks can choose to make it available to their banking customers. “The PassMark solution was one of the best, strongest authentication solutions” available.
The PassMark software is designed to show the image only when customers are using a specific computer. Bill Harris, the chairman and co-founder of PassMark, of Redwood City, Calif., said its product would be integrated with Voyager in a way that lets Corillian’s bank customers restrict access to certain online banking features if a user is connecting from an unrecognized computer but otherwise seem authentic.
Ariana-Michele Moore, an analyst at Celent Communications LLC in Boston, said “it certainly makes sense to integrate” PassMark’s software with Corillian’s. However, she also said many people use online banking at multiple locations, such as work and home, and may not appreciate having their access restricted at some places.
Steve Klebe, the vice president of sales and business development with PassMark, said that none of the alliance’s vendors compete with one another, and that none of the vendors other than PassMark and Corillian have attempted to integrate their products.
Other companies might be interested in joining the Anti-Fraud Alliance, but “five companies is enough to manage” for now, Mr. Klebe said. The group may invite a few additional companies to participate in two to three months, he said.
Corillian also has a monitoring service that it says can detect when criminals visit a bank site to try to duplicate it. The service can also detect the last site a customer visited before reaching the bank’s site; many phishing sites redirect victims to the real bank site, so checking the last page a person visited can help identify scams.
Symantec, of Cupertino, Calif., is one of the biggest providers of computer security products.
NameProtect, of Madison, Wis., monitors the use of its customers’ brands online, in order to spot impostor Web sites. MasterCard International Inc. is one of its customers.
Internet Identity, of Tacoma, helps institutions shut down impostor sites.
Mr. Maloney said that no company offers a complete start-to-finish method of detecting and shutting down phishing sites. But even without integrating their software, the five companies could work behind the scenes to make themselves more useful to banks, he said.
For example, he said, Corillian could use its monitoring service to detect fake sites that link to the real bank site. It could give this information to NameProtect, which could verify that the site is fake. This information could then go to Internet Identity, which could help the bank close down the phishing site.
Avivah Litan, a vice president and research director at the Stamford, Conn., market research company Gartner Inc., said the vendors do different things that banks need. However, “the banks are looking for more than each company has.”
Banks often learn about phishing and other trends from vendors, and a marketing arrangement such as the Anti-Fraud Alliance is healthy for the industry, Ms. Litan said. “If nothing else, the banks will know what they need to look at.”
The Anti-Phishing Working Group, which tracks phishing trends and shares several members with the Anti-Fraud Alliance, said in a report this month that the number of phishing sites is growing by 25% each month. The group detected 1,142 unique scam sites in October, 73% of which were impersonating financial institutions.
