MarkMonitor Launches Proactive Anti-Phishing Solution

The new solution is designed to help financial institutions address guidance set forth by the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation). As recently as March 12, 2004, these governing bodies have alerted banks to the increasing prevalence of e-mail and Internet related fraudulent schemes. According to this guidance, banks are advised to enhance their incident response programs to address these schemes by increasing suspicious activity monitoring, adopting procedures to alert customers of these schemes and establishing a process to shut down fraudulent sites. The Fraud Protection solution addresses this guidance and provides clients with the following features: - Continuous in-depth monitoring for new phishing scams using distributed honeypots and sophisticated baiting schemes. - Intelligence module to collect information about the systems and components of the phishing site. - Sophisticated event management system to handle high volumes of e-mails and to analyze and prioritize offenses. - Operations Center manned by trained security experts, supported by an automated analysis engine, to review high-risk e-mails to determine appropriate response. - Well-defined client communication processes to coordinate responses to phishing scams in real time. - Customer facing portal to allow immediate data sharing of events in process. - Evidentiary data collection in centralized database to be used as proof of criminal activity. - Multiple methods to respond against perpetrators including administrative and technical approaches. - Follow-up analysis and monitoring to evaluate remaining threats from scam source. - Vulnerability assessment to determine risk of phishing threats. Many phishing sites operate either from off-shore locations or from hijacked servers with exposed vulnerabilities. MarkMonitor, as an ICANN-accredited registrar, communicates frequently with international registries, registrars and ISPs for both domain registration and brand protection services. Now, with Fraud Protection, those relationships will provide a key differentiator as clients take administrative action to shut down phishing sites.